Tasks lists can be super helpful for creative firms or creative departments (e.g. art departments, interactive agencies, internal marketing or communications) to get more done, manage processes better and to get better information on their work (including tracking billable hours). They can also kill well meaning attempts at implementing project management.

People usually get tripped up by making task lists overly detailed, trying to map every single step in a process. On the other end of the pendulum, people make tasks are so broad that they become meaningless and don’t add any value to getting things done or to providing information to managers.

For project management efforts to succeed in a creative environment, you have to get the task list right. It has to be the right balance between a traditional work breakdown structure (WBS) and an MS Excel based to-do list.

The way to figure out the right combination is to start out by deciding exactly:

A. Why you want a task list i.e. what you are using the list for and

B. What do you want to track i.e. what kind of information you want to track on your projects.

Here are a few of the things tasks lists can be used for along with some guidelines for building truly usefull tasks lists and project schedules around them.

1. Creating Templates. Templates make life so much easier. Once you’ve come up with the right level of detail on your task list, make a template out of it and re-use it for every project. If you do several different kind of projects, create different templates for each one.

Templates have a ton of benefits.

• Templates make it fast and easy to populate a schedule with tasks, dates and even resources and time estimates;
• Templates provide consistent names of tasks so that you can run task reports that compare the status of the same task across all projects and you can;
• Compare how long specific tasks take on one client versus the other or one project versus the other.

2. Categories for Entering Time. The task list becomes a framework for items your team can enter time on. As a rule of thumb, each task should be something to which at least 20 hours of time will be spent. Group together related activities to make up those 20 hour plus tasks e.g. “Browser Testing of Website” instead of “Testing Website on Safari”, “Testing Website on IE8″ etc. On projects lasting 3 months or more, the threshold for a task should be 40 hours or more.

If multiple people are assigned to the same task or if different bill rates are used on different projects, use work types or categories of effort to distinguish the work one person does on a task from the work another person does on a task.

3. Controlling a Process. Here, the manager or team lead creates a task list so they can monitor and give team members specific direction on the steps they need to take. This is an illusion. A manager can specify the projects, goals and deliverables on a project but it is pretty near impossible to make a list of all the tasks that go into the work a creative professional does. Set up major goals as milestones or critical tasks. This will make it easier to track progress (see next item).

That’s not to say that a manager can’t better manage the resources on a creative team. But instead of trying to map out every step of the process, focus on prioritizing which projects and deliverables are most important. This will get you a lot farther than telling someone which steps of the process to work on.

To get a handle on how long a process takes or where there might be room for improvements, spend time with the creative professional to understand how they do their work. Be open to learning, start a dialogue with the professional and be constructive in working together to find process improvements.

4. Track Progress on a Project. Here, the task list is a tool to get a sense of how far along you are in the process of producing specific deliverables. Given the above mentioned difficulty of listing every step that goes into the creative process, focus on having the team members give you an update on the percent complete of a task or deliverable.

For example: instead of having 10 subtasks under “Testing a Website” and determining percent complete by seeing how many of the 10 subtasks are checked-off as done, creating a single milestone task called “Testing a Website” and have the team member enter in that they are 40% done with that task.

(Project management geek-out note: If you track actual versus estimated hours on tasks, as well, you can compare the number of hours used against percent complete to get even more information. This is back of the envelope earned-value management.)

Flagging a few tasks as milestones or as critical tasks will help you focus your project management efforts on those items that impact delivery the most. And if you have trouble getting team members to update the status of all tasks, asking them to update the status of only milestone or critical tasks can be much more palatable.

A Word About Schedules
As a side note, much of traditional project management and traditional management software (like MS Project) will use a critical path to auto calculate a schedule. This idea comes from a world where processes flow linearly and in a relatively predetermine way -and where people often have a small number of things on their plate. This isn’t the case with art departments, agencies, marketing, interactive or with just about any creative processes in general. For a creative group, project management can’t really be about critical path. Its more about getting the right information on a process, increasing efficiencies, great delivery and making good decisions. Other approaches can stifle.

In a creative process, therefore, instead of an auto-calculated critical path, the schedule should be determined

• By your commitment to your client (whether internal or external) and
• Critical tasks should be those which you manually indicate as being of critical importance to your project and schedule.

This gives you and your team the room to apply your own experience and expertise to setting up a project schedule. While, on the other hand, you’re still setting up crucial project gateways that need to be met to effectively track progress, manage the project and delivery on time.

I’ve often said that managing the active phase of a project is the most crucial part of a project’s lifecycle.  This is when the project’s goals are being worked on. Some have argued that planning is the most important phase. That good planning can take care of anything. An incident on the most recent spacewalk by NASA seems to prove my point.

Two astronauts went out on a spacewalk to fix a particular part on the Hubble Telescope. The part that needed repair was blocked by a handrail. To get to the part, they had to unscrew the handrail. But, of course, the bolt that held the handrail onto the telescope was stripped. They couldn’t use any of their tools to get it off. The plan called for them to use a tool to unscrew the bolt. But it wasn’t working. Eventually, they had to resort to brute force, yanking the handrail off with old fashion muscle, in order to get to the part. They called it ”Plan C.”

My wife and I cracked-up when we heard this. The same thing always seems to happen to our household projects. Nothing ever goes as planned, things take longer and you often have to come up with innovative solutions to achieve your goals (which sometimes involved brute force).  Even with the huge budget, master planners and technical information that NASA has, things don’t always go as planned.

Why is this important?  It has a direct impact on how you structure your projects, the techniques you use and the tools you use for managing projects.

Recognizing that the active phase is the most crucial part of a project’s lifecycle, means that the flow of information from team members to the project manager, and back again, is of utmost importance. It is only by having accurate information that the project manager can understand the situation and implement changes as needed.

Without good information, those astronauts would probably be stuck trying to build a tool that could unscrew the bolt, to go according to plan, rather than just getting the job done.

Plan for Success

Your project management plan is your bible for success. Without it, there will not be a project because without a workable plan, you have no way to reach your goal. Your plan must start at with the goal that you want to achieve. Then, break down that go into workable segments. Set a timeline for each segment. Your team should know these timelines and adhere to them. This does not mean that you make a mad dash between segments. You want to allow enough time for these various stages to be achieved while still being able to meet the overall deadline. Remember, you can rework your plan to find better ways to get you where you need to be.

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Nowadays, more than ever, people need to have effective time management skills. This is especially important when it comes to students. Whether you’re working on your associates degree, bachelors, graduate degree or going through job retraining, time management plays an important role in a successful educational experience.

Often students are juggling numerous things. They of course have their academics. Then there’s family and friends, and oftentimes a job. Depending on the amount of classes you are taking this can be an enormous task.

For time management to be effective you will need to schedule your normal activities, plus your class time, time for your assignments, work, etc. School will be a large part of your time management.

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Hiro Nakamura from NBC’s show Heroes has done the truly remarkable. The man from Yamagato Industries has broken all rules in project management and set new boundaries. Sure he can move time with his mind, bend the space time continuum and teleport. But yesterday he did something even more remarkable.

He executed a project using a comic book as the project plan.

Most project managers plan projects using some form of project management software or a Microsoft Project like tool. Even those that don’t use any project management software will, at least, use a spreadsheet like MS Excel to list all their tasks and keep note of their status. (These can get pretty complicated -as complicated as some project management software, with a variety of Excel Macros and built-in MS Excel functions set to automatically track and calculate the overall health of their projects.)

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