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Planning and Executing Your Project
Team Monthly Calendar
The monthly calendar is something all of you are familiar with and many
of you use. In addition to your individual monthly calendar, the team
needs a monthly calendar.
- Begin by e-mailing your schedules to one team member.
- Then merge the schedules, check times you have free on to a team
monthly calendar.
- Discuss other times where team members can rearrange their schedules
to accommodate meetings and accomplish the team’s project.
- Team meetings can be at the same time each week.
To exploit this system's full potential as a planning tool, the team
monthly calendar should be used in concert with your activity lists and
milestones. You can view the activity lists as worksheets for managing
large goals and the smaller sub-goals. Once the activity lists have been
discussed by the team and the tasks assigned, the important benchmarks
or milestones for the team can be recorded on the Team monthly calendar
along with the expected completion date of the goals. The activity lists
are the organizing tools and the Team monthly calendar becomes the tracking
tool for the team, as well as tracking meeting times. The Team monthly
calendar should be available to all team members. It should be updated
as needed, but reviewed at every team meeting. The Recorder is responsible
for keeping the Team monthly calendar current for the team. The Recorder
should record all the daily and weekly assignments at each meeting or
whenever the team meets to plan tasks to make sure that the activity lists
and milestones are feasible under the present conditions. The Recorder
reports signs that changes need to be made in the plans to stay on track.
The Team monthly calendar allows the team to look at their long range
planning and adapt the plan as necessary by more accurately anticipating
the unfolding of other time weeks in advance.
This information is vital to the team leader to keep the team on track.
High performance cannot be attained without being able to manipulate a
written plan to save time and adjust for unseen events. Goals, sub-goals,
and tasks have to be changed quickly and effectively, and without a team
time management system
in place time is wasted and the team can feel frustrated and confused.
With a written time management plan the team has a starting point. The
milestones serve as indicators of the team's progress. When one is missed
it is an indicator that the team needs to review their activity lists
and tighten up their time management. Missing deadlines forces the team
needs to reexamine some of their goals because there is a limited amount
of time available to finish the project. This ensures that even when a
team falls behind in their original plans, they can still redirect the
project towards meaningful results.
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