MBA Lessons Learned #4: Time Management and Project Scheduling
I recently completed my MBA at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business and have been looking back at my notes from the effort. While the courses have decidedly improved my knowledge base, perhaps the most important lessons occurred supplementary to the classroom. The next few posts will be a chronicle of the lessons outside of the textbooks that I took from my MBA program. The previous three installments include Team Building, Performance, and Leadership, Project Selection and Definition, and Team Collaboration Tools.
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Create a schedule and stick to it. Really, that is all you need to do.
As for why, after your first semester you will discover that many of your projects come due at the same time and/or your teammates are unavailable at a critical point in the project. This is miserable, at least for me. I desperately hate spending every last moment working on a project when, with a little planning, all of the resulting stress could have been prevented from entering my life.
Task Manager in Google Docs
By defining the project(s) schedules upfront you will be able appropriately divide up the project, assign parts to each team member, track progress, and prevent last minute conflicts (disasters). While there is a wide array of project management software, you can get by with any spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheets). What worked for my teams would be to break down the projects into tasks and assign them to the team members with due dates (eventually I started using conditionals to change the cell color depending on the task status relative to the due date - an easy way for everyone to make sure they are on track with their tasks). Be sure to include time for group reviews and that your due dates tie directly into the deliverables you agreed to in your project definition. The only tricky part, and relative advantage for formal project management software, was tracking prerequisite activities; even then it is not too difficult.
By developing your schedule at the beginning of the semester work overload and last minute scrambling can be avoided by you and your teammates. Again, a few minutes of planning upfront can prevent hours of headaches further in the semester.