The most important aspect of any project, personal or
corporate, is cost and cost is determined by the answers to the following two
questions:
-
How much time am I going to need?
-
And how many people am I going to need?
My background is primarily in software development and like
most modern forms of work it's very much a project-driven field. Software
developers are notorious for always delivering their projects late and over
budget. Why? Because project managers don't fully scope out all of the tasks
that must be done, and then they assign arbitrary times to their list of vague
overly broad parts of the project.
I use two techniques
to solve these problems: I use a mind map to
identify all of the tasks and then a project chart
(Gantt chart) to assign how long each task will take.
This sort of project management may not be necessary for the
tiniest of projects, but for most projects you are going to need an organized,
measured approach in order to accurately anticipate costs and to keep your
project on schedule.
How I Manage Projects
Using Business Graphics
In my last semester of college I was involved in a marketing
project along with three other students - we had to perform some basic market
research on the behalf of our client, an online niche news service.
We had to gather information from four target audiences:
-
What attracted current subscribers to the
service;
-
What might draw potential new subscribers to the
service;
-
What might draw large advertising networks to
publish with the service; and
-
What might draw smaller, direct advertisers to
publish with the service.
I'm going to use this small project as an example for the
purposes of this article.
Step 1 - Scope Your
Project with Mind Maps
I've written before about using mind
maps to organize your thoughts and ideas. Mind maps are a great tool for
organizing one's brainstorming but mind maps
are also a great project management tool, and they are especially helpful
for breaking down a project into smaller components.
The ultimate goal with our mind map, for the purposes of
project management, is to narrow the scope enough such that the tasks identified
on the map are specific enough to be easily understood by the project members.
I'm going to begin my mind map with the four target
audiences that I mentioned earlier.
That's the first step - the next step is to start adding
more specific subtasks as branches to each of the original tasks, like how I
have done in the picture below:
Now we're ready to move onto our project chart, given that
our mind map is complete.
Step 2- Convert Your
Mind Map into a Project Chart (Gantt Chart)
We used a mind map to clearly scope out all of the tasks
that will go into executing our basic market research project - now we need to
use a Gantt chart to schedule our project and monitor our project's progress.
In SmartDraw it's actually really easy to convert a mind map
to a Gantt chart because SmartDraw will automatically do it for you, as we
demonstrated in our most recent screencast "Managing
Projects with SmartDraw."
Here's the product of our initial conversion to a Gantt
chart:
I had to crop out some portions of the Gantt chart in order
to make it fit into this blog post, but you get the idea - we have an initial
Gantt chart to work with and now we need to begin determining the appropriate
start dates and durations.
Step 3 - Schedule and
Order Tasks on Your Gantt Chart
We have a basic order of operations that we need to follow
in order to complete the data analysis for our market research project:
- Prepare survey/questionnaire material
- Prepare prospect lists (if necessary - we
already know who our current readers are, for instance)
- Prepare distribution letters (if necessary)
- Identify distribution channels
- Distribute surveys and conduct interviews
- Analyze results
Some tasks can be conducted in parallel, such as preparing
questions and paring prospect lists, but some tasks can't begin until others
are completed - you can't conduct an interview without any prospects, for
instance.
After taking all of these factors into consideration we can
begin defining our start dates and durations, which would make our Gantt chart
look something like this:
The lines in red represent the deadlines for our primary
tasks, so they include all of the deadlines set by the subtasks contained
within the Gantt chart hierarchy. I've
included a link to a full-sized version of this Gantt chart in PDF format
below:
[PDF] Example - Market Research Mind Map and Gantt Chart.pdf
As you can see, the Gantt chart is small enough and simple
enough to be clear and easily understandable by the other members of my team -
they all know when each deliverable is due and when we need to start work on
any given portion of the project.
Step 4 - Measure Your
Progress with the Gantt Chart
My four man marketing project has a total duration of 10
business days - updating the Gantt chart with new Gantt bars, "progress bars,"
wouldn't really be necessary given the small scope of the project - however, in
the context of larger projects with larger teams it's important to communicate
your unit's progress to the other units that compose the project team,
especially if their tasks are dependent upon the completion of yours.
Learn More about
Project Management Using Mind Maps and Gantt Charts
If you'd like to learn more about project management using
business graphics you can watch our most recent screencast "Managing
Projects with SmartDraw."
Also, if you'd like to play around with the diagram that I
used in this example, you can download a free trial of SmartDraw and open the
example file below.
[Example] Example - Market Research Mind Map and Gantt Chart.sdr
