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Time Management
Concept
Time is essence. With proper allocation of time, the project will be in high productivity and efficiency. Time management helps the project team keep track of time and determine quickly if there will be any delay in completing activities that might disrupt the entire project's flow. This requires planning, scheduling, monitoring and controlling of all project activities. As one saying goes, ' you fail to plan, you plan to fail.'
Tool
Gantt Chart
It is the visual presentation of task scheduled over time. You can easily see:
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The start date of the project
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What the project tasks are
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Who is working on each task
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When tasks start and finish
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How long each task will take
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How tasks group together, overlap and link with each other
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The finish date of the project.
Experiences
The Gantt map was easy to grasp, perhaps because in the last semester we heard about it before. With Gantt Chart, we saw that the production of storyline videos takes longer time than anticipated and this may delay the day of implementation. Fortunately, we are able to realize it early before proposing to our community partner and managed to push back the project implementation days. It was time consuming to navigate to the left and to the top just to make sure we highlighted the right box. After editing Gantt Chart for a few weeks, we found out there is a "freeze" feature in Google sheet, so we decided to use it for the top 3 rows. It has made the Gantt Chart editing process so much simpler, quicker and less intimidating.
Values & Challenges
One drawback of the Gantt Chart is that it does not factor in rest time or that it expects team members can take their own break. As a team leader, I can leave the weekend boxes in the Gantt Chart blank. Nonetheless, I have an impression at that point in time that there should not be any blank column. I assumed that having blank column means no progress will be made.
Often, the gantt chart fails to understand that we are students, and we also have assignments to cope with. Halfway through the execution of the project, my team members were fatigued. While the gantt chart is flexible to change, our workshop dates are fixed so we cannot change the date and all we could do is finish making and editing videos before the trial.
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While gantt chart helped my team and our community partner envision the timeline of the project, we haven't been referring to it all the time. Partly because everybody was consistent, there was no delay on task except for a small pause in online campaign. When there was a slight delay in the online campaign, we never constantly update the Gantt Chart so it becomes irrelevant towards the end of the project.
