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10 Tips for Good Time Management (Malani Thomas)

Monday, 22 August 2011 | Du Toit, Malani

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1. Analyse the requirements in detail: Understand exactly what the project involves, down to the smallest details. Ask questions to clarify vague areas. Use professionals to clearly document the business requirements, the functional specification, and the design requirements.
2. Map available resources: Map available resources with requirements to ensure that there are enough people on site to complete the job. Identify all relevant infrastructures, including hardware, software, human resources, tools, documents, required to execute the project well before the project development starts.
3. Perform training and knowledge transfer: Include training, if any, as part of the project timeline. Don‘t treat training as something team members do on their own time, but account for it in the project schedule and budget.
4. Identify risks: Identify the potential risks and create contingency plans to deal with them. Develop a back-up plan to meet the project deadline in case of unexpected process or team member failures.
5. Estimate and allocate: Assign roles and responsibilities to team members and ensure each task has a clear owner. Use project management tools and Gantt charts to record who does what and identify start and end dates for each activity.
6. Modularize work: Break down main activities into sub-activities, until each activity is complete on its own and independent of other activities. Arrange them in logical order, and then start executing the smallest activity in the order of occurrence.
7. Avoid too many meetings: Plan meetings to discuss the status of the project, or on an as-needed basis to address immediate problems.
8. Write things down: Document the failures and successes of the project. This acts as historical information for similar activities in other projects.
9. Beware of 24/7 across the globe development: If there is a continuous engineering environment with development happening 24/7 across the globe, ensure clear communication to avoid misunderstanding between co-located or cross-country-located team members.
10. Escalate issues: Escalate issues to management as they occur and brainstorm on solutions to problems. The last thing you need is to try to remedy problems after they‘ve deteriorated beyond recovery. The key to a successful, timely project lies with proactive planning and time and resource management.