Day 70 — Creative PM series 4/7: “Timeline Management”
“Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.” ― Jean de La Bruyère. We all know that “time is money”, and in the digital design world, it’s even more so; because part of the product success factors is “Time-to-Market”. In order to efficiently deliver great results, timeline management is key to project success. Whether you’re running Agile, Waterfall, or Wagile, there are some timeline management technique might help you manage the product/ project “from good to great”.
In today’s article, I’m going to share my knowledge and experience around Timeline Management skills in the following breakdown:
- Why managing timeline
- When to evaluate & adjust
- How to
Value of Timeline Management
Whether it’s a small or large size, short or long term project, time management is always one of the most important indications of project success. A well managed project should have some sort of clear timeline expectations, and a proper way to manage it. Here’s the reason why we want to invest time in timeline management:
- Project Iron Triangle: “Fast, Cheap, Good, pick any two”. Most of the time after project kicked off, the “resource” part in Iron Triangle (figure below) is somewhat fixed, and it’s harder to adjust quickly. As a result, if the team need to adjust 2 of the 3 corners during the middle of the project, it’s usually either the “time” or the “scope” corner in the triangle. Therefore in order to ensure the product quality, it needs to be carefully managed.
- Team Collaboration: Whether you’re running Agile, Waterfall, or Wagile, you’ll probably need something from the upstream to feed to you, in order to kick off your work. For example, if you’re in design team, you’ll need creative brief or Business/Product Requirement Document (BRD/PRD); if you’re a consultant, you might need Scope of Work (SoW); and if you’re a front end developer, you’ll probably need design artifacts like visual comps and style guide. By providing/ understanding other team’s timeline and their delivery schedule, it’s easier for us to plan our work correspondingly.
- Business Planning: Whether it’s necessary or not, sometimes the business team or management level requires some sense of control; For example, startup needs to schedule time with angel investors, public company needs to create quarterly results for shareholders. Timeline is an effective way to provide that level of clarity so that the management team can better plan their grand strategy.
- Project Management: According to Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Without a good timeline control, sometimes some tasks might start to drag because of the lack of sense of urgency. If you’re running an Agile team, the Definition of Done (DoD) needs to be clearly identified and socialized upfront, so that the team can agree and we can effectively manage the timeline.
“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” — Parkinson’s Law.
Timeline Management in Project
For a Creative PM, when do we need to engage to actively manage the timeline? Let’s break it down through the framework of Double Diamond (figure below):
- Pre-project phase: Before the project starts, it’s usually a good time to analyze how this project benefit the team/firm in a longer-term strategy, whether it’s talent development, team’s portfolio building, or other factors. Another important aspect is the resource allocation; is the team already very busy? Is the new project going to make team members burnout? Who’s interested in this type of work? Do they have bandwidth to take on?
- Discover phase: In this phase, lots of research work happens. The common challenge in conducting research work is the logistics of user engagement. To schedule enough users with enough sessions in a short time frame is typically challenging, therefore the actual timeline of user research could be a little bit more fluid than we hope for. In timeline management, it’s important to both build in buffer time for it, also actively monitoring the progress and know when to adjust.
- Define phase: Based on the quality/ quantity/ types of research data, it will determine the corresponding “modeling” work in the “Define” phase. For example, if we don’t have enough data to create a set of meaningful personas, do we pivot and create proto persona instead? Do we still create journey map per user type? Do we derive experience principles from a small set of user feedback? It’s hard to have an accurate upfront timeline estimate for this phase before the research work is done. That being said, we also want to ensure we actively adjust timeline based on what kind of modeling work can be done.
- Design phase: In this phase, several creative/ innovative ideas will be generated, and some of these ideas might have a larger impact than we expected. For example, an idea could be “redesign the ecosystem to address the hidden user needs”, and this idea might change the scope of work, results in re-evaluating the timeline. Also, if we decide to test the idea before finalize it and move on to Delivery phase, the timeline might change due to the “testing & feedback” loop.
- Deliver phase: In general, this phase usually has the least surprise in terms of timeline or scope change. However, if the upfront tech feasibility analysis wasn’t done right or thorough enough, it might result in more design retrofit than expected. For example, the idea of “upload data and fix it on the front end in a real-time fashion” could be challenging for the back end tech to handle; therefore we might need to go back to drawing board to redesign it in a way that doesn’t require real-time update.
- Post-delivery phase: This phase tends to have the most fluctuated timeline compared to the other phases. Depending on the user/ market feedback, we might only need to work on some small tweak of the product, or we need to redesign the whole system entirely.
UX Roadmap for Timeline Management
For an active timeline management process, the goal is to create, maintain, and communicate a UX roadmap to the rest of the team, so that our counterparts know what to expect from us at what time. Below is breakdown of how to create a UX roadmap:
Upfront effort assessment
The first step it to have a good effort assessment (I wrote in my yesterday’s article), so that we can have a good foundation to start with. By understanding who’s going to work on what, and roughly takes how long, we will be ready to move on to the next phase: plug in real dates.
Plug in real dates
This step is fairly simple; just look at your calendar and start drawing Gantt chart on it to reflect the start and end date of each tasks. There are software like MS Project or other related project management software to use.
Configure dependencies
Unless you’re working on an agency type “cut-n-run” type of style, most of the time we will have some sort of dependencies from our upstream/ downstream partners that affect our timeline. For example, you need your content strategist provide content by June 1st, and your dev team might need you to provide wireframe by July 1st. Consult with our counterparts to discover if there’s any known dependencies we will need to take into consideration and adjust our timeline.
Consider off days and down time
Once you have a rough idea of when each tasks should start and end, now it’s time to refine it by considering off days and down time. For example, national holidays, team member’s vacation, typical performance downtime (e.g. code freeze), or other seasonal factor (low productivity in August and December due to vacation plans)
Conclusion
- Timeline management is one of the key indicator of project success. A good management process is worth investing time to get it right.
- Not only the upfront roadmap planning is important, the active management throughout the project is even more crucial so that the delivery can capture the value of “time-to-market”.
- When crafting delivery roadmap, it’s important to capture not only how long each task needs, but also other “human factor” in it.
What are some methods/ tips you use for Timeline Management? I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
