Personal project management: we increase the accuracy of management.

One of the most important professional qualities of a manager is the ability to meet deadlines, as well as the ability to predict deadlines and give a clear answer to the question: “by what point could you complete this?” In addition, he needs the skills of budget allocation of his time to make decisions such as “is it worth taking up this case, would it not harm the timeliness of other tasks?”

Now we will focus on methods that allow us to take into account when making decisions not only the priority of cases and the timing of their execution, but also the time spent on the execution of cases, their place in the general budget of time.

Resource calendar time planning. As before, a rich set of tools gives us an application of the analogy “personal time management - firm management”. The calendar and resource schedule of planning, or, more precisely, the budgeting of time, was born as a result of transferring such well-known project management tools as the Gantt schedule and resource schedule to the personal work technique.

Recall the essence of these tools (they are shown in the figure). The Gantt chart highlights the work that needs to be done, with their durations and interconnections. The scale can be different - you can view the relationship and individual elementary operations, and the entire project phases. Programs for project management make it easy to manipulate the schedule and answer questions like "How to change the project end date, if such an operation takes so much more time than we expected?"
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Below the Gantt chart is a resource chart showing the costs of various resources for each operation. This schedule allows us to work not only with the schedule, but also with the resources at our disposal. “If we do not perform such an operation ourselves, but purchase the corresponding service, will these expenses be paid back by the overall time gain of the project?” “How will the resource costs increase if we want to compensate for the delay in such an operation and complete the project on time?” etc.

It is clear that this toolkit is heavy for personal work, although a Gantt schedule can be very useful for extensive planning. The proposed schedule combines the features of the resource and calendar schedules, and is quite simple to use. It is created as follows.

1. We determine the time budget available at our disposal (in other words, the available amount of resources). We have a total of 24 hours a day. Of these, some need to be allocated for sleep and stuff, so much we can plan for work affairs. At the same time, it is usually advised to plan no more than 60% of the working time, which fully fits in with the concept of reserves in project management, allowing you to calmly respond to unforeseen circumstances. In principle, parts of the day related to sleep and rest can also be considered as reserves for extreme cases. But after successfully overcoming an extreme situation, one must not forget to restore the corresponding reserves of health, not to allow the accumulation of long-term fatigue.

Most likely, the time that you can budget on the basis of these considerations does not exceed 6-8 hours per day, and with a large number of small turnover - 4-6 hours. The next step is to add calendar elements to this essentially resource schedule.

2. Schedule deadlines (critical deadlines). It should be said that the proposed schedule is most useful in the following circumstances:

a) Streamline in time are subject to several fairly large cases that have relatively tight deadlines and compete with each other for your time.

b) You can at least very roughly estimate the time spent on each of these cases.

The resource-calendar schedule is a rather time-consuming thing to use, so if there is no described situation, it is better to do with the “planning through priorities” method described above.

3. Making a “tablecloth layout” - the distribution of the available budget of time between different cases. We divide the estimated labor costs in hours by the number of days during which we can deal with this matter (based on how many days are left until the critical time, how difficult this matter is to be “concentrated” in time - an important indicator for creative tasks, etc. ) We get the number of hours per day that we have to spend on this matter in order to be in time by the required date. We have higher priority issues, i.e. we make time for them first, the rest are “financed” by the residual principle. We try to keep reserves - 40% of unplanned time for unforeseen external circumstances and our own spontaneous activity. We take into account the principles of harmonization of time expenditures described above.

4. We use the schedule to manage our own activities. It should be noted that this schedule is not a plan, but a budget. That is, you are not obliged to perform tasks in the exact sequence indicated in the graph. The graph shows that during the day it is necessary to allocate so-and-so for such a thing, and at what particular time of the day you will fulfill it - determine along the way, proceeding from different considerations and circumstances. Note that you can also keep a second schedule - the budget execution schedule, i.e. operate with two graphs, together giving a bunch of "plan-fact" and prompting the necessary adjustments and plan, and ways of its execution.

Rationing, planning and time management projects. A prerequisite for the effective use of resource scheduling is a good knowledge of the structure of your time, the ability to at least approximately determine the duration and complexity of work. The methods that exist for solving the same problem on a firm scale are fully applicable.

Rationing time is the basis for planning and control. If you conduct continuous or selective timekeeping, gradually you will accumulate a base of standards for various types of tasks. In personal work, it would be too time-consuming rationing of elementary operations, as is done in project management; but very good results can be given by rationing the time spent on typical projects. For example, working on a quarterly report, you get the appropriate "project card" in which you record all your time expenses for this project, as well as the duration of work on it. The latter is no less important than the cost of time, because Many works, especially creative ones, require a certain level of “blurring” in time, and this will need to be taken into account when planning. In addition, in the "project card" it is appropriate to reflect the division of work into several main classes. The determination of the necessary standards for planning can be made for each of these classes separately, or simply, in relation to the scope of the project. For example, in the card shown in the figure, individual standards for schemes could not be calculated, but the amount of time required for the schemes could be related to the volume of the project in signs, assuming that in other similar projects the proportion of time spent on schemes would be about the same as and in this.

Planning time for a new project is made on the basis of standards developed in previous projects. In this case, you can use the well-known in project management "method of analogies". For example, when planning work on a presentation for the exhibition (even if the amount of work here is calculated in the number of slides), we can make the first slide, determine the approximate standard and time required for the manufacture of all slides based on the time spent; and then assume that the auxiliary operations (developing a presentation plan, swinging, i.e. drawing into work, etc.) will occupy approximately the same percentage of the time spent on the project as in the Report project. Note that bookmarking time reserves can be made both at this stage and when planning the entire time structure using the resource-based schedule.

The control of the project execution is carried out by comparing the achieved with the planned, in particular - the real labor productivity with the normative one. In project management, as part of the Earned Value Analysis technology, there are a large number of indicators that allow assessing the degree of deviation of the actual project performance indicators from the planned ones. For the purposes of your personal work, the method is quite intuitive: by assessing your productivity at the completed project stage, you recalculate the estimated amount of time you need to complete the remaining stages. Since time costs tend to increase rather than decrease, the resource calendar schedule recalculating the time spent on a project is likely to be reflected by the “thickening” of the corresponding “flap”, which will require adjustments to the overall time budget, and possibly restructuring the action program. For example, in Figure 2, the second draft, supplanted by the first, may require delegation (including the purchase of an external service), etc.

In conclusion, we note that the proposed methods, despite their external mechanism, are also quite valid for people of creative professions: top managers, consultants, brand managers, etc. Despite the difficultly formalized content of creative work, its form, in particular, time-consuming, turns out to be fairly well predictable and manageable as the base of personal standards accumulates.

We generalize and systematize. To maximize the effectiveness of the various approaches to planning described in the article, it remains to show their logical relationship. To do this, we first introduce the distinction between the project and the program, as it is usually understood in the system-sequential methodology (SMDM). The project (in the diagram on the right) can be represented as a “converging” funnel directed towards a specific goal. The arrows indicate the means converging to this goal, resources, subtasks. The program (in the diagram on the left) can be represented as a “diverging” funnel. The program does not have a specific goal, there is only a set of goals, enough abstract landmarks. The arrows show the internal and external capabilities that determine the direction of movement from the starting point.

It is easy to see that the project is optimal for action in task situations, when the desired result is determined fairly accurately. The program is good in problem situations, i.e. when there is some general direction of movement, but there is no clear idea of ​​the desired result. Such a situation, in particular, is the situation of planning the future of any developing system under conditions of competition and uncertainty. In particular - the development of personal strategy and company strategy.

An example of a program is a personal strategic plan, designed using attention structuring. The farther away from the focus of attention, the less “projectable” the pointers to cases contained in the system become, the more ideas, objectives, etc. appear. constructions that set not a clearly defined result, but a certain set of possible directions of movement and development, far from each of which is destined to become embodied. But the existence of this set makes it easy to relate the opportunities provided by the external environment with their own desires, and to choose the optimal path for further movement; in particular - to formulate specific goals for the near future.

This “strategic” program approach based on attention structuring is naturally combined with a “tactical”, project-based approach. In the figure, the operational level of the program, close to the initial planning moment, is filled with clear projects (interlinked in the calendar and resource plan). More distant projects that are in the “strategic preconscious” zone have not yet been drawn up, most likely these are only plans and folders with thoughts that are about ideas. And finally, the “strategic subconscious”, a distant perspective, is not yet clear. It is set only by fairly abstract targets and key areas, and, perhaps, by a bold strategic goal. There are no clear, measurable steps to it (otherwise it would not be impudent), but thanks to the program approach you will not miss the opportunities that bring it closer, but thanks to the project approach you will use these opportunities 100%.