Project management, as the name suggests, is to manage all the tasks and projects within an organization, streamline work and reach the organizational goals in a stipulated period.
It entails the following steps:
- Creating a project plan – This is a blueprint that will tell you how the project will be implemented, monitored, and delivered. Once created, it serves as a reference point for the entire project management team.
- Project Schedule Management – These details the project timeline and outlines the personnel required to complete the planned tasks. The purpose of the document is to communicate critical information to the team.
- Define Project Activities – It is all about defining each task that needs to be done for project delivery. A project management chart can help to visualize each task and associated deliverables accordingly.
- Ascertain Dependencies – Related dependent tasks are charted out to schedule the project accurately and thus avoid delays.
- Activity Sequence – This step ensures the ordering of activities that will follow one after the other so that efficiencies can be achieved.
- Man-hour and Resource estimation – This step is to estimate the number of hours that would be spent by each department associated with the project & also to estimate the number of resources needed to achieve the timelines.
Time Management is the time spent and how the project is progressing. Also, employee attendance who are part of a project plays a crucial and vital role for any HR before processing payroll. The HR needs to verify employee punches and apply various attendance and time policies based on multiple work shifts assigned to various sets of employees to calculate OT, UT, late coming, and biometric contributions.
It is of utmost importance to the stakeholders to determine the profitability of a project and helps in tracking the project.
Time management helps break down the projects into smaller tasks, assign tasks, and ascertain if the project is on track. It brings in a lot of efficiency in managing a project.
An effective time management strategy can be drafted and deployed with the help of these important processes:
- Create Task List – This is slightly different from the project task list. These individual tasks help you further break down the project-level tasks at a personal level. Managers need to encourage their team members to do the same as well.
- Set Priorities – It is indeed a healthy practice to write down the major sub-tasks for the day. Rank them in order of importance. Give the most important task your full attention and repeat this process for all the sub-tasks.
- Avoid Getting Distracted
- Delegate work to important team members so that everyone is occupied and work gets done together faster.
- Tackle Bottlenecks – As a project manager, there is always a need to check the workflow to identify where the project is facing a bottleneck. The most common reason is work overload.
So, What’s the Difference Between Project Management & Time Management?
As we have seen how time management is an integral part of the project management process; but there are some key differences that make time management stand apart from project management:
- Time management is a more versatile term that applies to all spheres of organizational process, be it HR, managing meetings, etc. In contrast, project management refers to methodically managing a particular job and looks at achieving the completion through defined tasks and the time attached to each task. Thus, time management is built within the project management process.
- Time management allows the processing of accurate compensation that needs to be passed on to the employees who enter their time for the allotted tasks in an organization. Project management, on the other hand, looks at completing a project on time and delivering it to the clients, thus contributing to revenue for the organization. This further cascades to compensation to employees and other benefits.
- Project management looks at painting an overall picture of the project implementation and delivery through specific tasks, resources, and time set for each task. On the other hand, time management can be used for allotting time to micro-tasks at an individual level.
- Project management can be a yardstick for the success of a particular project. Time management can be a yardstick for measuring the overall profitability of a client giving out multiple projects to an organization.
Thus, we looked at the overall picture of what project management entails and how time management is a crucial element in a project management process, contributing to its success. However, we have also seen how time management is a more widely applicable process that finds its benefits across various organizational functions. Time management is an umbrella process covering a broad spectrum of organizational tasks.