The Joys of a clear Calendar View, the Keystone of Mid-term planning
You are a busy person; you have meetings and appointments that dictate your everyday life, work and personal. As a project manager, you become even busier. Not only are you still responsible for your own schedule, but you also must oversee the project’s timeline and the schedules of your project team members. Suddenly, a busy work week might become a seemingly impossible week of deadlines and discussions. What you need at this point is a way to see everything that’s scheduled to happen for everybody and everything. For this, using software with a calendar view of your schedules can help.
A Short Paragraph On Why the Calendar View is Awesome
One of the strengths of using a calendar view is that you see the context of your work. Your team’s current project might span two intense weeks, but there might be a day before your next project you can use to run a retrospective and iron out your process, or you might be able to use that day to clean up any of the project’s loose ends. A calendar view of your team’s schedules also makes it clear what resourcing is like for each day of the project, which is especially useful if team members have vacations booked, need to take sick leave, or are involved in a lot of meetings. Calendars also make it apparent when holidays and weekends occur, which can sometimes skew statistics when not taken into account. It’s easy to get caught up in the details of a particular day, but sometimes it makes sense to have the context of the entire project or even beyond if you’re managing work for multiple projects or an entire product. When planning projects, it is invaluable to have a calendar view that displays events across various time periods and between all of your team members.
There Are Other Cool Options Too…
If calendars seem too rigid or overwhelming, one alternative is to look at more general timelines, which focus around one particular project. With a timeline, it’s easy to trace through the process and order of a project’s execution. In the cases where your project team includes different people at different times, you can lay out their work timelines against the project’s to find any gaps in resourcing. Timelines are great for providing a clear and simple view into what’s ahead for the project, as well as what has already passed. Although less comprehensive than a calendar, timelines can be less cluttered and confusing, which can make all the difference when you are under the pressure of a deadline.
And the Great News is, we Have Them All!
In terms of software that offer multiple time-conscious views of your project and team, OneDesk has you covered. With calendar views and timelines, OneDesk can give you the detail necessary for managing your project and resourcing needs in the long- and short-terms. Being able to see your project’s schedule at both levels is a powerful ability that enables you to manage at a large scale while being able to pinpoint specifics in the day-to-day. Beyond that, OneDesk also allows you to create Gantt charts to dig even deeper into a project’s progression at a fine-tuned level of precision and estimation. With all of these options, OneDesk has all of the tools to help you rescue your workflow when you hit roadblocks in your schedule.
Photo Credit : Hourglass 4 / Erik Fitzpatrick / CC BY