Is your project racing against time?
By Stephanie Oley

Time is rarely on your side when it comes to project management. According to the Project Management Institute’s 2023 Pulse of the Profession report, surveying almost 4,000 organisations across the globe, just over half of all projects are being completed on time.

This is why project time management is not just a skill that’s nice to have. It’s a core part of project management. When done well, it can make project managers seem like wizards who can bend space and time to their whims.

Several expert strategies and tools have been developed by industry experts to boost your project time management skills. But first, let’s explore project time management in more detail and look at where things can go wrong.

What tasks are involved to time-manage a project?

Project time management is the process of planning, scheduling, monitoring and controlling all project activities. It involves setting project timelines, organising and controlling tasks, allocating resources, and tracking progress throughout the project lifecycle.

Project time management can break or make a project.

A famous time-management fail was the stately Ford Edsel sedan. Its launch in 1957 followed 10 years of development and $250 million spent on research, strategy and marketing activities that were ultimately flawed. By the time it was released, the market had moved on to more affordable and compact cars, which did not include the Edsel.

Another famous example is the New York Second Avenue Subway, begun in the 1970s and still not fully complete. The first stage was delayed by more than a decade and incurred the world’s highest cost per mile of rail, owing to the complexities of tunneling beneath such a large city.

Such project failures are often attributed to the so-called planning fallacy, a phenomenon in which project managers underestimate the time, effort, resources and risks required to complete a task. This in turn stems from an optimism bias. Essentially, too many team leaders believe that everything will go to plan, despite documented evidence that similar projects are fraught with complexity.

By contrast, efficient time management allows project managers to monitor progress in real time, pull back on areas that conflict with scheduling, and keep the project scope in check. Read our related story on project scoping to learn what’s involved here.

6 steps of project time management

Broadly speaking, the following six steps will help you manage your project timings.

1. Define project activities – Map out the tasks required to deliver all the project’s outputs. These include designing, developing, testing, planning, monitoring and implementing the project.
2. Sequence and prioritise activities – Organise the project tasks and deliverables in order of importance and deliverability, each with clearly defined attributes and constraints. Then create a project outline and organise the steps in chronological order.
3. Identify required resources – Good projects have clearly defined parameters around the talent, materials, budgets and time allocated to each stage, so spend time getting this right.
4. Consider duration – Estimate how long each individual task will take to complete, and how these add up to define the full project timeline. Allocate contingencies in between tasks or stages to allow for unplanned or external disruptions.
5. Develop a project schedule – Using all the information collated to this point, develop a project schedule with specific timelines and deadlines, keeping in mind the project scope.
6. Control and monitor progress – Create a strategy to minimise risk and address any changes to the project schedule as it is being executed.

A good project management course will explore a range of topics that less-experienced team leaders are sometimes unaware of. These include staying focused on milestone dates, working towards the key deliverables and finishing the project on time. Understanding the importance of the critical path will ensure you focus your energies on the time critical activities, not just the important activities – a mistake often made.

You’ll also get to discuss the merits of various management tools, such as Jira, Asana, Project, Smartsheet, Wrike and Trello. To varying degrees, and depending on the project, all can be used for task management, time tracking, resource management, team collaboration, analytics and workflow automation.

As they say, time is money – and your project will be richer for the best skills you can develop in this area.