Time is very often synonymous with complexity in organizations. Therefore, it’s essential to understand it in order to work effectively, motivate teams, and achieve set objectives. This article presents two keys to success for regaining calm and visibility by creating realistic schedules.
How’s it going at work?
“Total workload,” “We’ve got plenty to do,” “I don’t know where to turn,” “We have projects going in every direction”… these are the most frequent responses to the traditional question, “How’s work going?”
The underlying observation behind these responses is the same regardless of the sector or the individual’s role: it’s tough for everyone!
Teams are increasingly under pressure, with a growing number of tasks to complete within ever-shorter theoretical deadlines. Turnover, burnout, and other issues are consequences of this pressure on employees.
This is especially true for middle managers who have to manage their tasks, oversee the work of their teams and/or clients and partners, and report to their superiors.
Even the most organized create schedules to plan tasks and track progress, but the response is invariably the same: “I’m overwhelmed.”
How can they get out of this situation and regain peace of mind and visibility?
The 2 keys to serenity
There are 2 essential keys:
- Evaluate the time
It is necessary to assess the time required to complete each task, including meetings, miscellaneous items, small recurring tasks, etc.
- Plan the time
It is necessary to provide visibility to teams and respect everyone’s constraints to ensure alignment and the mobilization of all stakeholders.
Assessing the time required to complete tasks and taking constraints into account are essential to enabling both the team and oneself to work effectively.
Implementing these two keys to success translates into creating realistic schedules, paying close attention to:
- Distinguish between the time required to complete a task (workload) and the duration of a task. The confusion between workload and task duration is the most common mistake.
The workload is 4 days but the task duration is 10 days because there are other topics to deal with during that period.
- Take into account each person’s leave and working hours. These can indeed differ from one individual to another (4/5ths, 35h, 36h, 38h30, etc.).
The workload assigned over 1 week to a person working 28 hours cannot be the same as that assigned to a person who works 35 hours per week.
Distinguishing between task duration and workload
The distinction between the duration of a task and the workload allocated to it is not intuitive and requires some practice to be easily grasped.
Furthermore, estimating the time needed to complete a task can be complex and time-consuming, as it often requires communication between different stakeholders.
Also, too many people neglect this step and stop at task planning without assessing the time required for completion, resulting in inaccurate schedules before work has even begun.
An individual might have eight tasks scheduled for the week, even though the workload for each task is only one day.
Take into account the capacity and constraints
Capacity assessment is more intuitive, but it is often incomplete because not all constraints are taken into account (meetings, absences, etc.), and the individual’s workload is either unknown or not monitored.
An individual might have one task on a given day with a full day’s workload, even though they have two team points that day.
In this case, their workload is 150% (100% for the task and 50% for the team points) for that day, making it impossible for them to meet their schedule.
The manager’s role is to distribute the workload to ensure that each team member’s workload is close to 100% for the day, week, or month, depending on the monitoring method and the team’s level of autonomy.
This work of assessing and planning time, taking into account individual capacities, is crucial and invaluable. It is rewarding for a project manager to provide visibility, enable their teams to work effectively, and meet deadlines.
Once these key success factors are understood, building a realistic schedule is a very powerful tool that allows you to optimize the work of your team members based on their skills, the sequence of tasks, absences, the progress of tasks, etc.
It is therefore a true tool for performance and productivity which also contributes to the satisfaction of all stakeholders in a job completed on time!