Planning and Executing Your Project

Weekly Objectives List

To further breakdown the tasks and help you manage the team's time, weekly objectives lists can be used to keep the team focused. Many teams use the weekly list to review whether or not they have left enough time to accomplish each task. Teams utilize weekly lists more in the formation and criticism stages of team building. The team use the weekly objective list to review and sub-divide the shorter term goals into weekly objectives (sub-goals) and to plan specific tasks for each laboratory session. The team can more accurately estimate the time required by using clear and concise action plans, monthly planners, listing the specific steps needed to accomplish. You, as the team leader, may believe that all is well but may find that adjustments need to be made to accommodate other team members' perspectives on whether the project is being run efficiently and effectively. Once the tasks are assigned the individual team members integrate them into their own weekly planners. Each team member must take responsibility to keep to the committed deadlines and agreements about time spent on their tasks. The weekly planner is the individual team member's method of tracking what he/she needs to accomplish to be effective and efficient. It is a good idea to make sure that the time estimates each person is using for tasks are accurate. Discussions about the accuracy of individual time estimates should be done before each lab period and at weekly meetings. There may come a point where the overall objective may need to be adjusted because of the time constraints of the project. The earlier the team makes this decision, the better the quality of your results.

As the team becomes more proficient at collaborating about time management you will soon notice that tasks are being completed on time, communicating problems is handled more efficiently and that doing future action plans take less time. The team can then direct their focus to fine tuning their activities to become high performing.

Assign the activities involved in each Overall Objective to the appropriate Team Member