TIME MANAGEMENT FOR PROJECT MANAGERS
Effective time management is one of the most difficult chores facing even the most experienced managers. For a manager who manages well-planned repetitive tasks, effective time management can be accomplished without very much pain. But for a project manager who must plan, schedule, and control resources and activities on unique, one-of-a-kind projects or tasks, effective time management may not be possible because of the continuous stream of unexpected problems that develop.
This exercise is designed to make you aware of the difficulties of time management both in a traditional organization as well as in a project environment. Before beginning the exercise, you must make the following assumptions concerning the nature of the project:
You are the project manager on a project for an outside customer.
The project is estimated at $3.5 million with a time span of two years.
The two-year time span is broken down into three phases: Phase I—one year, beginning February 1; Phase II—six months; Phase III—six months. You are now at the end of Phase I. (Phases I and II overlap by approximately two weeks. You are now in the Monday of the next to the last week of Phase I.) Almost all of the work has been completed.
Your project employs thirty-five to sixty people, depending on the phase that you are in.
You, as the project manager, have three full-time assistant project managers that report directly to you in the project office: an assistant project manager each for engineering, cost control, and manufacturing. (Material procurement is included as part of the responsibilities of the manufacturing assistant project manager.)
Phase I appears to be proceeding within the time, cost, and performance constraints.
You have a scheduled team meeting for each Wednesday from 10—12 A.M.
The meeting will be attended by all project office team members and the functional team members from all participating line organizations. Line managers are not team members and therefore do not show up at team meetings. It would be impossible for them to show up at the team meetings for all projects and still be able to function as a line manager. Even when requested, they may not show up at the team meeting because it is not effective time management for them to show up for a two-hour meeting simply to discuss ten minutes of business. (Disregard the possibility that a team meeting agenda could resolve this problem.)
It is now Monday morning and you are home eating breakfast, waiting for your car pool to pick you up. As soon as you enter your office, you will be informed about problems, situations, tasks, and activities that have to be investigated. Your problem will be to accomplish effective time management for this entire week based on the problems and situations that occur.
You will take each day one at a time. You will be given ten problems and/or situations that will occur for each day, and the time necessary for resolution. You must try to optimize your time for each of the next five days and get the maximum amount of productive work accomplished. Obviously, the word “productive” can take on several meanings. You must determine what is meant by productive work. For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that your energy cycle is such that you can do eight hours of productive work in an eight-hour day. You do not have to schedule idle time, except for lunch. However, you must be aware that in a project environment, the project manager occasionally becomes the catchall for all work that line managers, line personnel, and even executives do not feel like accomplishing.
Following the ten tasks for each day, you will find a worksheet that breaks down each day into half-hour blocks between 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. Your job will be to determine which of the tasks you wish to accomplish during each half-hour block. The following assumptions are made in scheduling work:
Because of car pool requirements, overtime is not permitted.
Family commitments for the next week prevent work at home. Therefore, you will not schedule any work after 5:00 P.M.
The project manager is advised of the ten tasks as soon as he arrives at work.
The first step in the solution to the exercise is to establish the priorities for each activity based on:
Priority A: This activity is urgent and must be completed today. (However, some A priorities can be withheld until the team meeting.)
Priority B: This activity is important but not necessarily urgent.
Priority C: This activity can be delayed, perhaps indefinitely.
Fill in the space after each activity as to the appropriate priority. Next, you must determine which of the activities you have time to accomplish for this day. You have either seven or seven and one-half hours to use for effective time management, depending on whether you want a half-hour or a full hour for lunch.
You have choices as to how to accomplish each of the activities. These choices are shown below:
You can do the activity yourself (Symbol = Y).
You can delegate the responsibility to one of your assistant project managers (Symbol = D). If you use this technique, you can delegate only one hour’s worth of your work to each of your assistants without incurring a penalty. The key word here is that you are delegating your work. If the task that you wish to delegate is one that the assistant project manager would normally perform, then it does not count toward the one hour’s worth of your work. This type of work is transmittal work
and will be discussed below. For example, if you wish to delegate five hours of work to one of your assistant project managers and four of those hours are activities that would normally be his responsibility, then no penalty will be assessed. You are actually transmitting four hours and delegating one. You may assume that whatever work you assign to an assistant project manager will be completed on the day it is assigned, regardless of the priority.
Many times, the project manager and his team are asked to perform work that is normally the responsibility of someone else, say, an executive or a line manager. As an example, a line employee states that he doesn’t have sufficient time to write a report and he wants you to do it, since you are the project manager. These types of requests can be returned to the requestor since they normally do not fall within the project manager’s responsibilities. You may, therefore, select one of the following four choices:
You can return the activity request back to the originator, whether line manager, executive, or subordinate, since it is not your responsibility (Symbol = R). Of course, you might want to do this activity, if you have time, in order to build up good will with the requestor.
Many times, work that should be requested of an assistant project manager is automatically sent to the project manager. Lu this case, the project manager will automatically transmit this work to the appropriate assistant project manager (Symbol = T). As before, if the project manager feels that he has sufficient time available or if his assistants are burdened, he may wish to do the work himself.
Work that is normally the responsibility of an assistant project manager is transmitted, not delegated. Thus the project manager can transmit four hours of work (T) and still delegate one hour of work (D) to the same assistant project manager without incurring any penalty.
You can postpone work from one day to the next (Symbol = P). As an example, you decide that you want to accomplish a given Monday activity but do not have sufficient time. You can postpone the activity until Tuesday. If you do not have sufficient time on Tuesday, you may then decide to transmit (T) the activity to one of your assistants, delegate (D) the activity to one of your assistants, return (R) the activity to the requestor, or postpone (P) the activity another day. Postponing activities can be a trap. On Monday you decide to postpone a category B priority.
On Tuesday, the activity may become a category A priority and you have no time to accomplish it. If you make a decision to postpone an activity from Monday to Tuesday and find that you have made a mistake by not performing this activity on Monday, you cannot go back in time and correct the situation.
You can simply consider the activity as unnecessary and avoid doing it (Symbol = A).
After you have decided which activities you will perform each day, place them in the appropriate time slot based on your own energy cycle. Later we will discuss energy cycles and the order of the activities accomplished each day. You will find one worksheet for each day. The worksheets follow the ten daily situations and/or problems.
Repeat the procedure for each of the five days. Remember to keep track of the activities that are carried over from the previous days. Several of the problems can be resolved by more than one method. If you are thoroughly trapped between two or more choices on setting priorities or modes of resolution, then write a note or two to justify your answer in space beneath each activity.
Briefly look at the work plan for one of the days. Under the column labeled “priority,” the ten activities for each day are listed. You must first identify the priorities for each activity.
Next, under the column labeled “method,” you must select the method of accomplishment according to the legend at the bottom of the page. At the same time, you must fill in the activities you wish to perform yourself under the “accomplishment” column in the appropriate time slot because your method for accomplishment may be dependent on whether or not you have sufficient time to accomplish the activity.
Notice that there is a space provided for you to keep track of activities that have been carried over. This means that if you have three activities on Monday’s list that you wish to carry over until Tuesday, then you must turn to Tuesday’s work plan and record these activities so that you will not forget.
You will not score any points until you complete Friday’s work plan. Using the scoring sheets that follow Friday’s work plan, you can return to the daily work plans and fill in the appropriate points. You will receive either positive points or negative points for each decision that you make. Negative points should be subtracted when’ calculating totals.
After completing the work plans for all five days, fill in the summary work plan that follows and be prepared to answer the summary questions.
You will not be told at this time how the scoring points will be awarded because it may impact your answers.
Monday’s Activities
Activity Description
1. The detailed schedules for Phase II must be updated prior to Thursday’s meeting with the customer. (Time = 1 hr)
2. The manufacturing manager calls you and states that he cannot find a certain piece of equipment for tomorrow’s production run test. (Time = ½hr)
3. The local university has a monthly distinguished lecturer series scheduled for 3—5 P.M. today. You have been directed by the vice president to attend and hear the lecture. The company will give you a car. Driving time to the university is one hour. (Time = 3 hrs)
4. A manufacturer’s representative wants to call on you today to show you why his product is superior to the one that you are now using. (Time = ½ hr)
5. You must write a two-page weekly status report for the vice president. Report is due on his desk by 1:00 P.M. Wednesday. (Time = 1 hr)
6. A vice president calls you and suggests that you contact one of the other project managers about obtaining a uniform structure for the weekly progress reports.
(Time = ½ hr)
7. A functional manager calls to inform you that, due to a schedule slippage on another project, your beginning milestones on Phase II may slip to the right because his people will not be available. He wants to know if you can look at the detailed schedules and modify them. (Time = 2 hrs)
8. The director of personnel wants to know if you have reviewed the three resumes that he sent you last week. He would like your written comments by quitting time today. (Time = 1 hr)
9. One of your assistant project managers asks you to review a detailed Phase III schedule that appears to have errors. (Time = 1 hr)
10. The procurement department calls with a request that you tell them
approximately how much money you plan to spend on raw materials for Phase III. (Time = ½ hr)
Tuesday’s Activities
Activity Description
11. A functional manager calls you wanting to know if his people should be scheduled for overtime next week. (Time = 1/2 hr)
12. You have a safety board meeting today from 1—3 P.M. and must review the agenda. (Time = 2½ hrs)
13. Because of an impending company cash flow problem, your boss has asked you for the detailed monthly labor expenses for the next three months. (Time = 2 hrs) 14. The vice president has just called to inform you that two congressmen will be
visiting the plant today and you are requested to conduct the tour of the facility from 3—5 P.M. (Time = 2 hrs)
15. You have developed a new policy for controlling overtime costs on Phase II. You must inform your people either by memo, phone, or team meeting. (Time = 1/2 hr) 16. You must sign and review twenty-five purchase order requisitions for Phase III
raw materials. It is company policy that the project manager sign all forms. Almost all of the items require a three-month lead time. (Time = 1 hr)
17. The engineering division manager has asked you to assist one of his people this afternoon in the solution of a technical problem. You are not required to do this. It would be as a personal favor for the engineering manager, a man to whom you reported for the six years that you were an engineering functional manager. (Time
= 2 hrs)
18. The data processing department manager informs you that the company is trying to eliminate unnecessary reports. He would like you to tell him which reports you can do without. (Time = ½ hr)
19. The assistant project manager for cost informs you that he does not know how to fill out the revised corporate project review form. (Time = ½ hr)
20. One of the functional managers wants an immediate explanation of why the scope of effort for Phase II was changed this late into the project and why he wasn’t informed. (Time = 1 hr)
Wednesday’s Activities
Activity Description
21. A vice president calls you stating that he has just read the rough draft of your Phase I report and wants to discuss some of the conclusions with you before the report is submitted to the customer on Thursday. (Time = 2 hrs)
22. The reproduction department informs you that they are expecting the final version of the in-house quarterly report for your project by noon today. The report is on your desk waiting for final review. (Time = 1 hr)
23. The manufacturing department manager calls to say that they may have to do more work than initially defined for in Phase II. A meeting is requested. (Time = 1 hr)
24. Quality control sends you a memo stating that, unless changes are made, they will not be able to work with the engineering specifications developed for Phase III. A meeting will be required with all assistant project managers in attendance.
(Time = 1 hr)
25. A functional manager calls to tell you that the raw data from yesterday’s tests are terrific and invites you to come up to the laboratory and see the results yourself. (Time = 1 hr)
26. Your assistant project manager is having trouble resolving a technical problem.
The functional manager wants to deal with you directly. This problem must be resolved by Friday or else a major Phase II milestone might slip. (Time = 1 hr) 27. You have a technical interchange meeting with the customer scheduled for 1—3
P.M. on Thursday, and must review the handout before it goes to publication.
The reproduction department has requested at least twelve hours’ notice. (Time
= 1 hr)
28. You have a weekly team meeting from 10—12 A.M. (Time = 2 hrs)
29. You must dictate minutes to your secretary concerning your weekly team meeting which is held on Wednesday 10-12 A.M. (Time = ½ hr)
30. A new project problem has occurred in the manufacturing area and your
manufacturing functional team members are reluctant to make a decision. (Time
= 1 hr)
Thursday’s Activities
Activity Description
31. The electrical engineering department informs you that they have completed some Phase II activities ahead of schedule and want to know if you wish to push any other activities to the left. (Time 1 hr)
32. The assistant project manager for cost informs you that the corporate overhead rate is increasing faster than anticipated. If this continues, severe cost overruns will occur in Phases II and Ill. A schedule and cost review is necessary. (Time 2 hrs)
33. Your insurance man is calling to see if you wish to increase your life insurance.
(Time ½ hr)
34. You cannot find one of last week’s manufacturing line manager’s technical reports as to departmental project status. You’ll need it for the customer technical interchange meeting. (Time 1/2 hr)
35. One of your car pool members wants to talk to you concerning next Saturday’s golf tournament. (Time = 1/2 hr)
36. A functional manager calls to inform you that, due to a change in his division’s work load priorities, people with the necessary technical expertise may not be available for next week’s Phase II tasks. (Time = 2 hrs)
37. An employee calls you stating that he is receiving conflicting instructions from one of your assistant project managers and his line manager. (Time 1 hr)
38. The customer has requested bimonthly instead of monthly team meetings for Phase II. You must decide whether or not to add an additional project office team member to support the added work load. (Time 1/2 hr)
39. Your secretary reminds you that you must make a presentation to the Rotary Club tonight on how your project will affect the local economy. You must prepare your speech. (Time = 2 hrs)
40. The bank has just called you concerning your personal loan. The information is urgent to get loan approval in time. (Time ½ hr)
Friday’s Activities
Activity Description
41. An assistant project manager has asked for your solution to a recurring problem.
(Time = ½ hr)
42. A functional employee is up for a merit review. You must fill out a brief checklist form and discuss it with the employee. The form must be on the functional manager’s desk by next Tuesday. (Time = ½ hr)
43. The personnel department wants you to review the summer vacation schedule for your project office personnel.
(Time = ½ hr)
44. The vice president calls you into his office stating that he has seen the excellent test results from this week’s work, and feels that a follow-on contract should be considered. He wants to know if you can develop reasonable justification for requesting a follow-on contract at this early date. (Time = 1 hr)
45. The travel department says that you’ll have to make your own travel
arrangements for next month’s trip to one of the customers, since you are taking a planned vacation trip in conjunction with the customer visit. (Time = ½ hr) 46. The personnel manager has asked if you would be willing to conduct a
screening interview for an applicant who wants to be an assistant project manager. The applicant will be available this afternoon 1—2 P.M. (Time = 1 hr)
47. Your assistant project manager wants to know why you haven’t approved his request to take MBA courses this quarter.(Time = ½ hr)
48. Your assistant project manager wants to know if he has the authority to visit vendors without informing procurement. (Time = ½ hr)
49. You have just received your copy of Engineering Review Quarterlyand would like to look it over. (Time = ½ hr)
50. You have been asked to make a statement before the grievance committee (this Friday, 10—12 A.M.) because one of the functional employees has complained about working overtime on Sunday mornings. You’ll have to be in attendance for the entire meeting.
(Time = 2 hrs)
