Keep all your ducks in a row! 🦆🦆🦆 Get everyone on the same page and primed to hit deadlines by creating a project delivery timeline.
"Fail to prepare, prepare to fail" might just well be the mantra of project management. The success of any project is determined, to a large extent, by the amount and quality of planning you do beforehand.
One of the great project planning tools is a project delivery timeline – a method of organizing work by breaking a project into manageable blocks. It lets you create a step-by-step path and shows you a broader picture of your project, helping you avoid potential obstacles.
So let’s take a closer look.
A project delivery timeline (also called a project management timeline) is a visual representation of a project schedule that includes the project tasks and deliverables laid out in chronological order, determining their sequence and duration.
In other words, it’s an overview of the entire project from start to finish, which breaks it into milestones and tasks and specifies their deadlines.
A good project timeline should not be static – it must adapt to the needs that appear as the project progresses, to ensure all the goals and requirements are met on time.
We should also point out that a project timeline is not the same as the project schedule. While they both help track the progress, there is a difference between these tools.
A schedule is rather a detailed plan covering all the steps that need to be done and determining who is responsible for them and when they’re due. A project timeline reflects a bigger picture of the project, showing the milestones and deadlines but not getting too deep into the details.
A project delivery timeline is incredibly helpful in project management. It facilitates the planning process and keeps the project on track, helping to avoid possible roadblocks and giving your team a sense of direction when working on project delivery.
Providing team members with a single view of a project, project timelines let them see interconnections among different project pieces and understand how exactly the part they are in charge of relates to the rest. It also ensures everyone shares the same goal.
A successful project timeline lets team members see a project as a logical sequence of manageable steps, taking off psychological pressure that might be caused by overwhelming project scope. It gives people a structure where all the project phases and tasks are identified and prioritized, improving the organization.
It’s much easier to allocate resources (like time, budget, or human resources) when you have a clear roadmap – because you know what you will need and when. A good project timeline will help schedule resources wisely and handle project financial management.
A project timeline is a great collaboration tool as it gives all team members an idea about the milestones and dependencies. Clarity lets people communicate better, preventing misunderstanding and potential conflicts.
When everyone knows their responsibilities, and when each task has a specific deadline, a person assigned to it will feel more accountable. This has a most positive effect on productivity.
Making a project timeline is an organized approach, and the absence of it might lead to confusion around priorities, tasks, and deadlines.
Working on a project, you rarely follow the route you initially planned to follow. Without a project timeline, you can get lost. It’s hard to change a project plan, but it’s even harder to change chaos – you just don’t know where to start.
By discovering task dependencies and visually representing them, you can prevent potential bottlenecks far before they become an actual problem. But if you don’t do it, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to address possible risks.
Without a plan, people might do the same work twice, or waste too much time and effort doing tasks that are not that important. As a result, they will feel burnt out and demotivated.
The steps needed to create a project timeline are as follows:
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At this point, you identify the most important project details, such as:
Once the preparation phase is over, you can start decomposing a project into smaller tasks. You decide what actually needs to be done to achieve the goals stated and produce the deliverables, and you define a work breakdown structure (WBS) – a detailed task list, where each task is associated with a certain deliverable. You also assign responsibilities so that everyone understands what they’re expected to do.
Different tasks will require a different amount of time and resources to be completed. That amount will depend on various factors, such as task complexity, dependencies, and resource availability.
To estimate time as accurately as possible, you should use several sources of information:
The next step is allocating resources – human resources, materials, and equipment. There are two main factors you should take into account while making a resource plan: availability and skill set (for human resources).
Assigning resources who are available will protect team members from getting overloaded and burned out (or, on the contrary, from staying idle), ensuring a fair workload distribution. And assigning human resources based on their skill set will have a positive effect on their productivity and morale – people naturally tend to enjoy doing tasks they’re good at.
For an effective resource allocation, you can use resource management software like Runn. In Runn, you get access to everyone’s schedules and can assign the right people to the right projects in real time, balancing team members’ workloads.
Estimating resources also involves developing a project budget – a plan of how much you will spend and for what, which is a part of project cost budgeting. This will help you not go over the budget or suddenly run out of resources.
This includes the following substeps:
The first thing you should do to prevent failures is to identify potential risks. However, you cannot always predict everything – and for this reason, you should have a plan B.
To begin with, it’s a good idea to add time buffers around deliverables in case something goes wrong. It might happen that some critical resources are suddenly not available – for example, people working on a key deliverable might get sick, and you will need time to find a replacement.
Besides, you should also make a contingency plan that would provide you with solutions for unexpected scenarios, including the worst-case ones. For example, you could plan to have a contingency budget that would allow your project team to use extra money if there are any unexpected costs. Or you could make a plan of who will replace whom in case people have to leave.
Project timelines are not set in stone – to ensure their effectiveness, you would have to regularly monitor and update them. Incorporate all the delays and changes in your project timeline to reflect your project's progress, so you can see the actual picture of what’s going on. And, what’s very important, remember to communicate with stakeholders about any changes in timings for deliverables.
Project delivery timelines provide you with a clear picture of what the work on your project's progress is going to look like, helping you keep it under control.
It’s a great planning tool for project managers that helps them track project progress and handle it as effectively as possible, keeping everyone organized.
It's worth making the time upfront to create detailed timelines that you can refer back to as the project progresses - it'll save you time in the long run, without a doubt.
