I don’t know about you, but if I don’t have a schedule — for the day, the week, the month (and sometimes the year), I’m at a loss. I’m floundering. I’m wandering around aimlessly all day.
Okay, so maybe that last point is a bit extreme.
However, this much I know: I need to know what I’m doing and when I’m doing it.
Life without a schedule is a structureless one, often late for appointments, forgetting to pick up kids from school, and (gasp!) missing the baseball game.
In the business world, a day without a schedule can wreak havoc on a team and the entire organization.But not all schedules are created equal. A visual, personalized, customized schedule maker is your answer.
In this article, we’ll discuss what makes for a solid schedule maker, how it can help you be more productive, and dive into the essential elements of a business schedule maker (and how staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can help!).
What makes for a sound project schedule maker (and why is it necessary)?
For any given project, there are a lot of moving parts.
A. Lot.
Tasks. Deliverables. Dependencies. Stakeholders. Team members. Deadlines. Sub-projects. The list is endless.
And things tend to change from day-to-day.
With so much in play, any delay along the way can turn into a domino effect of setbacks … which, in turn, can lead to missed deadlines and unhappy clients. Nobody wants that!
A schedule maker is a planning tool that details all required project tasks, the resources required to get the job done, and the start and end dates of your project.
A solid, practical, helpful schedule maker includes all items related to the project, including (but limited to):
- Task and subtasks
- Deadlines
- Milestones
- Deliverables
- Resources & requirements
- Budgets
- Stakeholders
The above list is just table stakes.
For a schedule maker to stand out from the crowd, it must also be:
- Visual
- Customizable
- Accessible
And have built-in communication tools and permission restrictions in place.
5 ways a schedule maker increases efficiency
A good schedule maker helps to keep things on the right track.
A good schedule maker means teams can manage the project schedule and set reasonable project expectations.
A good schedule maker is essential to ensuring a successful project.
Bonus: A good schedule maker helps increase efficiency!
Specifically, schedule makers mean that:
1. Timelines are more clear. Start dates. End dates. Task duration. Deadlines. Having a schedule keeps teams on track (and honest) and makes it more likely projects will be completed in a timely fashion.
A Work OS (like staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud) helps also.
As you can see (in the VISUAL) timeline above, an entire project can be laid out on one screen. Note: Larger projects will have a more detailed timeline. This Gantt chart view makes the project super-simple to visualize.
Gannt chart not your cup of tea? Try viewing your project schedule as a Kanban board.
Kanban boards show project tasks and timelines via “cards” that visualize and break down a project’s workflow into actionable pieces.
2. Projects are more likely to remain within budget. Scary fact — only 43% of organizations mostly or always deliver projects on budget. Ouch.
A project schedule (see: staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud budget tracking template below) can help to visualize necessary time and resources … which helps to keep budgets front and center.
This translates to a more efficient budget allocation since all budget-related content is in one place, accessible for all to see.
3. Resources are better allocated. A project schedule creates instant oversight into available resources — financial information, staffing needs, and so on. An effective schedule means visibility into all essential resource allocation.
Note: This also helps with #1 and #2 above.
And yeah, we’ve got a template for that. This template is even more helpful for teams that have more than one project running at a time. Who ever has just ONE project anyway?
4. Bottlenecks are avoided (or spotted early on). Let’s be fair. Bottlenecks are inevitable, but early identification means less chance they will derail your project. A project schedule helps teams visualize potential issues — overdue tasks, for example — enabling managers to catch problems early and adjust timelines and/or resources as necessary.
Catching issues (aka, bottlenecks) early on lessens the chance of future delays.
5. Variations are addressed promptly: Ideally, your project plan has gone through the wringer. All tasks and subtasks are outlined in advance, and your team is moving forward. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Inevitably, someone will add a new task or modify an existing one.
If you are not careful, this can throw the entire project off-kilter. Having a good schedule maker in place helps to address this potential “variation.”
The 4 steps to a successful project schedule
We know why making a schedule is important (and how staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud makes it super-easy), but now it’s time to understand a bit more about how to ensure a project schedule is successful.
Here is your 4-step project management checklist:
1️⃣: Build out the plan. A good starting point is downloading one of our fully customizable templates. We suggest the project planning template to get you started.
2️⃣: Share the plan. Be proud of the plan you created! Share it with your team (internal stakeholders) and 3rd parties (external stakeholders).
Once you add subscribers and guests … they can add comments and feedback directly. Gone are the days of back and forth, endless emails, and phone calls.
3️⃣: Test. Test. Test. Use something like the staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud project tracker layout to display your entire schedule and see how it looks.
4️⃣: Tweak and iterate. Your project is off and running. But just because you’ve created a killer schedule does not ensure everything will be unicorns and rainbows.
Making improvements and tweaking the project schedule is par for the course.
The good news is work management software (ahem, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud) makes changing your schedule super super easy.
(Even more) reasons to use staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
In case you haven’t made the case yet as to why staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud is your answer when it comes to scheduling-making software, here are a few more.
- Templates. Templates. Templates. We have templates for every industry inside the platform that are totally customizable to fit your team’s needs.
- Automations. Use one of our “automation recipes” — pre-defined combinations of triggers and actions — to save time and reduce the chance of forgetting to take an action.
- Integrations. staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud integrations connect with the tools you already use to have all your team’s work in one place.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s get started.
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