Estimated Timeline
Introduction
The world’s trade market is developing fast, and managers should develop their skills even faster. Time management is aimed at helping managers, as well as other employees, to work better and faster. There are different tools for improving the speed and quality of work; however, there are those that are more preferred and those that managers do not use often. This paper is aimed at showing the main and the most commonly used tools of time management and how they work; besides, the paper will contain the analysis of how those tools may influence and be influenced by different environmental circumstances, such as social, legal, economic factors and others. Moreover, the paper will contain two charts that are often used in time management while working on a project and their explanation. The paper will help time managers to evaluate the tools of time management and choose those that fit a project most.
Time Management
Time management is a set of knowledge that is of great economic importance, as well as of personal value. The economic importance is that time management may be significant in increasing productivity of both an individual and a group. Private significance lies in the fact that it allows a person to gain a significant amount of free time, which will allow paying more attention to one’s leisure, health and personal life. Time management as a system includes a number of elements that are used together and decrease time required for the implementation of various production processes. These elements include analyzing the time usage, setting goals that a leader wants to reach using time management, planning of working time, the development of different responses to the causes of wastage of time resource.
There are several principles of time management that every manager or a group leader should know. Those principles are called the Eisenhower’s principles:
- Urgent and important;
- Important but not urgent;
- Urgent but not important;
- Not urgent and not important.
Primary tasks are the most urgent and important tasks. It is significant to understand that putting aside those tasks and problems will create unnecessary problems for a manager in future. Besides, such problems should be solved by a leader himself. Further, there are important things, which are not urgent. Such problems can be postponed, but they can have a strong impact if they are not solved for a long time. Non-urgent and important things might become urgent and important, if they were constantly postponed. In order to ensure that this does not happen, it is necessary to remember about them. Urgent but not important tasks have little effect on one’s success. However, if a manager together with his or her team does not pay attention on those tasks, it may affect the level of performance. These things take up much of time allowance. These are the tasks that might be completed by the team members. It is logical to assume that non-urgent and unimportant things do not really matter, and do not bear any consequences for their non-compliance. Such cases can be safely deleted from to do list.
Organization
A company is about to host international guests, whom they will sign a contract with. The future contract is significant for the further development of the company, as well as for its position in the world’s trade market. That is why everything should be organized well. The president of the company has invited a time manager to work on this project, because the project of hosting international partners is rather significant and a company does not have its own time managers. The president of the company asked the time manager to develop a plan, which includes sightseeing, negotiation according to the future contract, as well as dinner with the president of the company and other entertaining events.
Estimating Time
The first thing a time manager should do is to create a team that will help him. This team should include those who do not have current urgent tasks, not to interfere with main job and not to damage the work process. Besides, the team leader should estimate social, financial and economic factors. This means that participating in the team will not interfere with the main job, as it has been already mentioned; besides, the group should not be either large or small, because a small group will not be able to complete everything in time, and if there are many people in the team, they will either interfere each other or there will not be enough employees to complete the job in the company. Thus, it may cause additional financial problems. First thing that a time manager should do is to estimate the time they have to complete the task and understand how much time the international partners will spend in the city. Besides, the time manager should know information about the country the partners are from, because it will help him or her to understand what will be of great interest for the guests and what they might not like. The next task is to discuss the ideas of sightseeing with the president of the company, because he or she knows the partners better and may offer something new. After discussing everything, the time manager should create a team, which should include employees from the president’s office, as well as those who work in other departments. If the company is rather big, the time manager may have one person from every department. This will help to understand the needs of the company better, as well as the needs of clients and optimize the process of working. When the team is built up, the team leader should explain the members of the team the main tasks and divide those between them. At this step, the team manager may have some problems because the members of the team might not be willing to complete their tasks and some discussions might occur. The time manager should be a psychologist in some matter to understand how to divide the tasks and what tasks are appropriate for the members of the team. Besides, the time manager should estimate correct periods, because if he or she misestimates those, the task might not be completed. Moreover, the time manager should understand that something might go wrong, for example an employee gets sick and is not able to complete his or her task; that is why it is important to be able to give this task to someone else or to complete it himself.
Charts
Psychologists say that it is easier to understand everything if a person does not read a text but sees a picture or a chart instead. This is the reason why time managers prefer to present their plans and information about a project in charts. Nowadays, the most popular charts that are used in project management are PERT chart and Gantt chart.
Project Evaluation and Review Technique, PERT, is a technology assessment and evaluation of projects, which is used in technology project management. PERT is a way of analyzing the tasks that are necessary to complete the project. In particular, it is an analysis of the time required to perform each task, and the entire project. PERT was developed primarily to simplify the planning on paper and scheduling of large and complex projects. PERT technique is designed for very large-scale, one-time, complex, not routine projects. This technique involves the presence of uncertainty, giving the opportunity to develop a project schedule without precise knowledge of details and the time required for all of its components. The most popular part of the PERT is the critical path method, based on constructing a network graph (network diagram PERT).
Gantt chart is a popular type of bar chart that is used to illustrate the work schedule or plan of a project, and provide a graphical display of the distribution of human and technical resources in the production process. This type of chart is designed primarily for schedule management. However, it does not represent the actual size of the project or the relative size of the elements of the work.
Conclusion
Time management has become a significant part of modern business. Almost every company has a time manager who helps the employees to use their work time wisely and coping with the most of tasks, at the same time, ensuring the quality of work. The paper’s aim was to show the main milestones of time management and provide an example of how it works. The example, which the project focused on, was a company that was going to sign a contract with international partners. The problem was that the organization did not have its own time manager and the one should have been invited. The time manager used all the knowledge to organize the reception of international partners and their leisure.
