Planning and Executing Your Project

Time Management

Organizing time as an individual is difficult and requires planning. In teams people collaborate and each individual member must work to changes how they perceive time management in a group environment. Teams experience special time concerns and team members bring their own unique perspective on how they manage time to the team. Some team members may find that a substantial chunk of their time is flexible, while another team member may be over-committed. How will a team handle over-commitment by an individual team member? Will the other team members give up personal time to maintain an equal work distribution? Or will the team instead discuss the team members’ expectations about an equitable delegation of work?

Everyone allocates time for the different activities in their lives. Some are disappointed with their ability to plan, keep to deadlines, and produce quality work. If specific time is not set aside for a task on a team schedule, that task may not get done efficiently (or at all). Creating a team calendar of activities helps the team to organize an equitable distribution of the assigned tasks. To help with time management, consider your personal perception of time.

Time Perception

How do you perceive time? Do you procrastinate and/or do you get things done? Do you leave papers to the night before the deadline? Your decisions and actions form your perceptions of reality. Your time perspective is part of that reality. When teams clearly define goals, execution is carefully planned, and efficiency increases. Time is a commodity and resource to be carefully considered when doing a collaborative project. Good time management is identical to having well-defined, clearly stated goals.

A goal is a desired and valued circumstance toward which people are working (Katzenbach and Smith, 1994). In a team there are two strata of goal-setting: personal goals and the team goals. Understanding the difference will help improve the efficiency of the team. Setting realistic goals both personally and as a team is the hardest part of managing time effectively. Clearly defined team goals are the first step to developing a team vision, motivating the team to perform effectively and with a common purpose. The most important step in team-building is establishing clearly defined goals with specific planned steps to create successful accomplishment of these goals. When teams commit to goals they must consider many outside and inside pressures. Both inside and outside pressures contribute to your development of a team culture. Building a team culture is personal and collaborative. The future success of your team depends on your decisions and actions. The method used to plan and organize your team culture will significantly impact upon how you will think, feel, and behave while on the team. Planning your collaborative effort carefully is of paramount importance. Creating a shared vision motivates individuals to high performance.

Team Planning and Scheduling

Many people assume that they know how to use their time effectively. Usually everyone begins with what they consider to be an effective time management plan. Team members provide each other with phone numbers, schedules and availability and then plunge right into the task. What more could you need? This is not sufficient for effective and efficient planning. Team members must manage time carefully in order to avoid issues. The major complaint about collaborating with others is that the workload is not shared equitably, and progress is hindered by unanticipated problems. When viewing other team member's schedule or your own are you observing whether the team member or yourself left enough time to efficiently perform the goals that are being set by the team? Each team member needs to pay careful attention to the other person's mindset, their time management skills, their communication style, their working style, thinking style, where their competencies lay, and their technical capabilities.

Individually, many of these time management tasks are done mentally. But effective team management is only accomplished by recording the thinking process involved in planning and communicating the agreed upon milestones and commitments in writing to clarify the team's goals and how and when they will be accomplished. Imagine your life without a mental “Weekly Planner”, or a “To Do List”, or if you completely stopped communicating your plans to others. How effective would you be?

Planning has probably played a major role in your success to date, but most of the planning you have done has been on an individual basis. Planning team and collaborative activities takes more flexibility and patience. In the initial stages of team development planning can be frustrating and slow, but once the team is formed properly collaborating can save you time. Learning how to plan in advance with other people will become as effortless as your individual planning. The key to effective team planning is good communication. Part of effective communication includes creating and maintaining team monthly calendars, milestones, activity lists, and action plans. These can result in making you and the team more efficient and effective.

Tracking Time

Time is not infinite, therefore how you make use of it is important. The overall goal of the class is to become high-performing at the project. To check whether your time management has been effective, use time tracking. Setting goals, breaking them down into manageable chunks, allocating those chunks to specific time slots in the team's schedule, ensuring that the action plans are effective on important tasks and keeping each individual team member on track may seem like more work than it is worth. But once your goals and plans for the semester are set, your planning for the rest of the term should take your team no more than an hour or so each week to maintain. Without a systematic plan you would spend more time setting goals and planning tasks.