|
Planning and Executing Your ProjectWORKBOOKActivity Lists and Time EstimatingActivity lists can be used to further break down the project tasks and help you manage the team's time. They can help to keep the team focused. The team use the weekly activity list to review and sub-divide the shorter term goals into weekly objectives (sub-goals) and to plan specific tasks for each laboratory session. Many teams use the activity list to review whether or not they have left enough time to accomplish each task. 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 you will be able to redirect your project to ensure that you still obtain meaningful results. Teams utilize activity lists more in the formation and criticism stages of team building. As the team becomes more proficient at collaborating about time management you will soon notice that tasks are being completed on time, communicating problems are handled more efficiently and that planning future activity lists and action plans takes less time. The team can then direct their focus to fine tuning their activities to become high-performing. Example of Some Activities: Project ManagementActivity Lists: List Activities you need to accomplish in the following areas:
Time EstimatingAre your goals and activities appropriate for the time available? This a question that has to be answered before all the tasks are broken down into weekly activities. The hardest part of the time management task is assigning the time estimate to the activity. When estimating time you might want to allocate more time than you think will be necessary for your team to to complete each goal. Most teams underestimate how long each task will take. To keep the team on track it is absolutely necessary to review your time management system at your weekly team meeting. In the beginning, you will probably notice a discrepancy between the number of hours the team expected to use in certain tasks and the actual number of hours the team spent. If the team finds that more time is spent in one area than calculated and less in another, this information can be used to plan future experiments efficiently. Tool - Estimating Activity Time (EAT)You have some historical data to draw upon for your time estimates. You know how long it has taken each of you individually to prepare for some of the tasks. Establishing the amount of time it will take to collaborate and write a paper, support the oral presentation, run experiments in the laboratory, etc. must rely upon assumptions. These assumptions include, the optimistic completion time, the pessimistic completion time, and the most likely completion time. Optimistic Completion Times are predicated upon the assumption that all will go according to your action plans. According to Kerzner (1999) this occurs about 1% of the time. Pessimistic Completion Times are predicated upon the assumption that everything will go wrong. This also occurs about 1% of the time. Most Likely Completion Times incorporate historical evidence, team members committed time schedules, and your strategic management skills to predict the time. This the time that you feel would most often occur. You can combine these three times into a single value for expected timeby making the assumption that the probability distribution of time required for an activity is expressible as a beta distribution with a standard deviation that is one sixth of the range. (Hiller & Lieberman, 1967). The expected time to do the task can be calculated as:
Assign the activities involved in each Overall Objective to the appropriate Team Member:Experiment: Team Members Name Activities
Time
Estimates Team Members Name Weekly Activities
Time
Estimates Proposal: Team Members Name Activities
Time
Estimates Team Members Name Weekly Activities
Time
Estimates Oral Presentation: Team Members Name Activities
Time
Estimates Team Members Name Weekly Activities
Time
Estimates |
|||