- Through most of my career as a videographer,
live sound engineer and technical director
in the nonprofit space, I rarely if ever had big teams
to work with, or small teams for that matter.
So, while I did have lots of planning to do,
project plans weren't really a thing that I considered.
I mean, why would I take the time to write or schedule out
a plan if I was gonna be the only one seeing it?
And even when I did have a small volunteer team
to put to work, it was almost always only
for a few hours at a time.
We would meet for a few minutes at the start
of an evening of work and I would dole out assignments
and we would get going.
Now, I look back and cringe at the amount of time
I wasted doing things that way.
And not just my time either, the valuable time of my group
of volunteers too.
See, I thought I had everything organized in my head.
For some small projects maybe I could get away with that
but for the larger ones, no way.
My mental project plan motto was,
flimsy at best and catastrophic at worst.
Fast forward a couple of years to me leaving
the nonprofit world and starting with TeamGantt,
we were a small team and I was sure that my keep it all
in my head approach would still work.
And it did for about a month.
Then project started to get bigger and they required people
and resources other than just me.
Not only that, but the deadlines were tighter
than I was used to and I had more than one major project
in progress at any one time,
which was a whole nother wrinkle for me to figure out.
This is the part where I should have put the pieces together
that I was working for a company
that makes project planning software.
But I'm stubborn so, yeah.
After a couple of stressful projects that got finished late,
not being quite as efficient as I should have been
and a few very difficult but gracious conversations
with my project stakeholders, I finally got the hint.
Okay, so I'm ready to start creating project plans, great.
Now, I finally decided to sit down and write out
every single thing that needed to be done
for my next project.
Not only the task, but how long I thought it would take.
Which tasks could be worked on concurrently,
which ones were dependent on others
and if I would need any outside help for anything.
As you can imagine, the list got long and confusing.
I can't believe I tried to hold this in my head
for all my past projects.
Next, I sat down and TeamGantt and started planning it out.
First, I just put all the tasks I had written down
into the task list.
No scheduling yet, I just got everything in there.
Then I started with my estimates
and scheduled every list item as a task,
stretched out for as long as I had estimated it would take.
Then I added dependencies so I could make sure
I didn't get ahead of myself.
When I was done, I sat back and I looked at my masterpiece
of a plan and it was gonna take way longer
than I actually had to get the thing done.
- Houston we have a problem.
- After the panic subsided,
it was time to take a closer look at my plan
and optimize it.
Will it really take me three days to write that script?
What about this section of screen capture?
Couldn't I get that done in two hours instead of four?
These three tasks could actually be milestones
and can all be knocked out on the same day.
And if I can get this first edit done in six hours
instead of eight, then that'll leave me time
to do the audio mix and maybe even get started
on the color correction.
What I quickly realized is that having everything
written out in a plan allowed me to see potential pitfalls
and address them before I ever started working on anything.
Previously, I would have assumed everything was good to go
and been in a real pickle
when things inevitably went off the rails.
And they would have, because they had so many times before.
Another thing I realized is that there were tasks on my plan
that I was too ambitious about.
Seeing it on a timeline allowed me to make adjustments
to the plan to keep things moving quickly but realistically.
Don't get caught in the the trap of thinking that your plan
only exists to make everything happen faster.
A plan isn't magic, the work still needs to be done
by imperfect people in an imperfect the world.
Things will come up, people will get sick,
equipment deliveries will be delayed.
I mean, a global pandemic might kick off, who knows?
Your plan exists so you can get a realistic schedule
for getting everything done, not so you can do
twice the work in half the time.
Oh, and there's another upside to this planning thing
that I had never considered before.
Planning everything out and then tracking how long
it actually took to get the tasks done can be super helpful
when you have to plan your next project with similar work.
If you're consistently giving yourself three days
for a task that end up only ever taking two days,
you can start to make that adjustment on future plans.
And the reverse is true too.
If you've been cutting it close on a certain type of task
and finding yourself cutting corners to get it done,
now you know you need more time to get that done
on future plans.
Your estimates will get better and better
and before too long your plans become stress killers.
You get all the work done you need to with less stress
and more accurate predictions for your stakeholders.
Okay, so some final thoughts.
Remember, your project plan is an important tool
that will help you to organize your thoughts
on how the project will work, think through all the tasks
that need to be performed, assign timelines or estimates
to tasks, consider what if any outside people or resources
you may need and get better at estimating future projects.
If like me you do a lot of similar projects,
it can be frustrating to reinvent the wheel
every time you have to build out that next project plan,
and tour TeamGantt project planning templates.
We have an entire library of planning templates
that you can use to get a headstart on your project plans.
And on the off chance that you can't find
a pre-made template that fits your needs,
you can turn one of your past project plans
into a template yourself.
It's easy, just open the project you want to save
as your template and go to menu, save as template.
You'll get a dialog letting you know that the project
is now marked as a template.
The next time you need to create a project,
you can select your template
when you create the new project.
Just give your new project a name
and select the save template.
When you create your project you can decide
whether to bring in notes, comments or checklists
from the template project, select which days of the week
you want your project to cover and TeamGantt
will even suggest people to invite to your new project.
That's it for today.
Hopefully that helped you to see the value
in always having a plan and using templates in TeamGantt
to make creating those plans easy and painless.
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Thanks, we'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)