10 Effective Steps to Create A Perfect Project Timeline

Timelines are essential for all projects, be it in any industry. You can’t imagine a project without the understanding of initial and ending dates. For these reasons, project managers across the globe keep punctuality as the most prior thing while planning projects. Thanks to the technological advancements of today that you’ll get plenty of options while searching for project management tools online. However, since there are so many options, getting confused while choosing the best one is quite an obvious thing. Not anymore as we explain to you 10 effective steps to create a perfect project timeline. All you need to do is follow the tips below and find a tool that ensures you all the features described here. So, without any further ado, let’s start with the first step of project timeline creation.

1. Project Brief: Once you get a project, the first thing to do is have an initial project vision. It includes the project description, approximate costs, your goals, potential challenges and most importantly, the deadline. You need to be ready with a brief of all this info, which will remain as the reference document for the investors, customers and your team members. However, the brief should be simple, short and yet descriptive.

2. Understanding Project Scope: The second step is to understand the project scope. Knowing how to create a project timeline depends mostly on how you can understand and organize a project scope. It should include the deliverables you need to complete by the end of each day. Also, you can include the project requirements, constraints and priorities in the project scope. The project scope will be your personal planning document.

3. Work Breakdown Structure: Right after creating the project scope, it’s time to break down the work structure. It means breaking down your project into specific work elements. You can create milestones so that these are easier to achieve or split the deliverables into smaller deliverables. However, you need to ensure in this step that you don’t confuse the Gantt diagram with WBS as these are two different things.

4. Task List: The fourth step of creating a project timeline is the preparation of the task list. It means dividing the work into small tasks that require micromanagement. Though for the bigger tasks it might be difficult to estimate the timelines, for smaller tasks you will easily create lists. The main reason for creating a task list is to assign tasks to your professionals, which we are going to explain in the fifth step.

5. Assign Tasks: In this step, you need to define task accomplishment, which means you need to assign tasks to your professionals. During this phase, you need to make sure you assign specific tasks to specific individuals or teams who are skilled and experienced in the niche. Assigning tasks to the wrong team can be a waste of all your time, effort and resource. Hence, before assigning tasks, you can do a small assessment.

6. Time Estimation: This is where the timeline is the most important. Time estimation also means setting a timeline or deadline for your entire project as well as for works and small tasks. Thankfully, you can rely on advanced project management application like Task Closet, which can make your assignment easier because it’s integrated with timeline settings. The professional’s assigned tasks will get notifications for the same.

7. Define Dependencies: After setting a timeline, you need to create task dependencies. It means you need to make a relationship among all tasks and analyse which one is dependent on which one. Accordingly, you can either assign tasks from the beginning or alter tasks so that the entire project flow remains intact. Though defining dependencies may seem an easy task, it can be difficult when you need to map dependency requirements.

8. Set Milestones: Though we’ve already mentioned setting milestones while explaining work breakdown structure. However, after task assignment, timeline assessment and dependencies, you need to again focus on project milestones. It means you need to track work progress once the team starts delivering their tasks. Milestones will help your team to deliver work on time and also stay motivated in the long run.

9. Choose Task Closet: Since creating a timeline has been a tedious process for project managers worldwide, project management tools have been initiated by top web and app developers. Task Closet is one such application that’ll let you do everything that we are explaining in this article. Starting from creating project briefs to work assignments, timeline management and report creation, it has every feature that you’d want.

10. Share Timeline: Once you are done with all the above steps and you have logged into Task Closet, you can finally share the timeline with all your professionals via this application. As the most user-friendly project management app, Task Closet provide access from a smartphone, PC, laptop, tablet and every other gadget once you launch the website. You can also download the app from your phone to keep a daily track.

Now that you know the 10 most effective steps to create a perfect project timeline, go ahead and make the most out of it. If you are looking for a reliable project management app development company that’ll give you a customized solution, look no further. We at Idiosys Technologies provide a plethora of options when it comes to feature-rich and trending project management tools. Task Closet is our brainchild that has shown all our clients’ immense success in diverse industries. We also provide web and app solutions to a huge number of multi-national and start-up companies from India, Canada, the USA, Germany, Australia, Brazil, the UK and Panama. You can either opt for Task Closet or get the app customized according to your needs and preferences. So, why wait anymore? Feel free to get in touch with us today to know the best deals for you.