Feb 19, 2009
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Project Management: Getting Started
The first, and often hardest, step to starting with project management is creating a task list. Many people try to think of everything that goes into a project or job, write that down, then want to capture the changes between one job and the other by tracking which were the specific tasks that were different.
The idea behind this is that people want to better visualize their process so they can track how different reality is from the plan, where delay’s happen and where they can improve things. The problem with this approach is that no two jobs are ever the same. No two, super-detailed lists are ever going to be the same. You’ll spend more time changing the plan then recording data.
You can get the same reports and data by making a more comprehensive task list then tracking time, start dates and end dates, and team member’s notes on the tasks themselves. By making it less detailed, you can apply the task list to more situations and see the big places first where things go wrong. Once you identify those, you can dig deeper into the other information to learn where you can start to improve. But if you try to start with too granular a list, you’ll spend too much time worrying about the exact right lists and never get your project management efforts under way. (Later on, with this step under your belt, you can expand the task list or create different ones, different flavors, for different situations. )
As a general rule, on jobs taking three weeks or longer, think of tasks as buckets that will hold at least 20 hours worth of work. In terms of description, make it general enough that it says what phase or milestone of the project you’re on e.g. installing equipment, but not too detailed that the specifics of what happens on the ground, in real life, will throw off the value of your entire task list. You don’t want to have to change descriptions by the hour or even by the day.
If you want to track specific buckets of effort, use work types against time. These are specific categories into which time can be placed independent of task descriptions.
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