How to Hit your Timelines in a Collaborative Environment

Deadlines and timelines are the key to success in most projects. Time-based motivation can easily become positive or negative, depending on how deadline structures take into account a team’s existing workload and capacity. Research by PMI shows that poor management and missed deadlines lead to losses equivalent to 1/10th of a project’s budget. Preparation can help enhance coordination within an organization and a team; where a well-made structure can be a source of energized focus as opposed to stress and pressure. Here are some tips on how to ensure you hit your project management timelines. Before setting deadlines, tasks must be evaluated on an individual basis in terms of the complexity of the work involved, and laying out the sequence by which tasks must be performed. While some team members may understand that certain tasks must be completed for others to be started, laying out an organized sequence will make the timeline-building process much more intuitive. Not sure how to sequence your tasks? Learn more here. After mapping out the work that needs to be done and fully grasping the amount of time and skill required on a task-by-task basis, setting deadlines will be a much more intuitive process for the project. While setting deadlines, it is important to find a balance between ambitious and realistic deadlines - focusing on one or the other will affect your team’s efficiency in the long run. As they say, pressure makes diamonds; but only the right amount of pressure will allow team members to exceed their limits, and not burn-out in the process. This does not mean that a 50/50 balance between ambitious and realistic is the best approach universally. It differs on a project-by-project basis and is also influenced by the organization’s culture. Ensuring they fit both the team’s and the objective at hand, is a crucial aspect of the right timeline structure. But how do you measure your team’s efficiency? Manual inspection is a rudimentary process. TRIYO provides staffing analytics that allow you to understand how your team members perform at specific tasks, through individual as well as team and project wide metrics. Want to learn more about how we can enhance your staffing queries? Click here. Despite extensive preparation, mistakes might happen, and a well-prepared contingency strategy is more important than attempting to ensure perfection in a project management environment. The most imperative solution is to maintain transparency at all stages. Provide internal team members and external stakeholders or clients, with regular updates on progress as well as issues. After sufficient clarification, reviewing where the issue stems from, will become a much easier process. To keep all internal and external members of a project updated at all times, is almost impossible considering the varied availabilities of any critical member of a project. These tips can drastically improve how your teams hit your deadlines, but would require manual oversight with minor chances of automation. Looking for something more time and cost efficient? Collaboration technology is the modern solution. TRIYO provides an intuitive project management platform, that gives your team the insights they need to make informed decisions, while providing the foundation for resource planning as well as performance management. Project managers can now evaluate member workloads, estimate project timelines, and assign specific roles to team members based on the deliverables. It also allows team members to receive instant notifications and reminders through the platform as well as e-mail, making the project planning structure as well as the team briefing much more efficient. TRIYO also provides staffing analytics that allow you to understand how your team members perform at specific tasks, through individual as well as team and project wide metrics. TRIYO is a comprehensive solution to all your project management needs. Try out our product here, or contact us below if you have any queries.