Avoiding The Reminders From Your Manager

You might have seen your manager sending out reminders all the time and you might have really wished not to receive a single one. It would save a lot of time embarrassment if you could remember all such tasks, complete them at the required time and then inform it to your manager. This majorly falls in the domain of effective time management, but the intent of this article is more towards the usage of available tools rather than preaching effective time management.

1. Use a notepad - Simplest but somewhat inefficient and ineffective way. This will not give you any automatic reminder and is not useful apart from serving as a to-do list. However, since notebook is easily available to each one of us, it can/should be used to at least note down the to-do items. This should further be followed up with appropriate reminder mechanism mentioned below. [Recommended reading for managing ToDos - http://bhavin.directi.com/my-todo-list-the-most-powerful-weapon-in-my-productivity-arsenal/]

2. Email Reminder – Outlook allows you to set a reminder flag. Right click on the “Flag status” and choose “Add Reminder”. This will throw a pop-up which will allow you set the reminder for required date and time. Once set, the reminder will appear in the reminder window at the set time. Note that if you just “Flag” the message for follow-up, it will NOT give you any reminder service.

3. Outlook Task– Outlook also allows you to add a task with a specific reminder setting. You can add recursive tasks with various combinations of recursion. Once set, this also gets popped up in the reminder box.

4. Schedule an appointment in the calendar– Plan your day in advance. Assign appropriate time slots to the tasks at hand. The moment you make an entry in the calendar, Outlook will automatically set the reminder to a pre-defined time (usually 15 mins before the slot) and you will get a pop-up for the reminder.

5. Configure Recurring events– Outlook Tasks and Calendar Appointments can be scheduled as recurring entities and hence come handy for daily, weekly or monthly activities. For example – I have set recurring reminder for completion of Project Assessment Report on “First Tues of every month”.

Project Management Tool – Spreadsheet

Don’t get surprised, even a simple spreadsheet can become very effective project management tool, due to it’s extensive computational set.

One can easily put up a plan for a 2-3 weeks project in the spreadsheet, if the project is not that complex, if there are not many dependencies and is to be executed with only a couple of resources. Those who are not so familiar with MS Project like tool can use excel to their benefit and achieve the project management goals.

A simple table like this could also be useful:

Task Name	Resource Name	Estimated effort	Start Date	End Date	Status

End Date column can have a formula to calculate the end date automatically base on the effort column. And if you are really keen on using the spreadsheet only, you can append the above column list with other columns like “actual effort”, “actual start date”, “actual end date” and then put your skill to develop formulae to extract tonnes of information from this table.

I personally never to planning in excel as I find this very primitive. And most of the times I have access to MS Project, which does all the above mentioned things and loads of more like a breeze.

Project Management Tool – MS Project

To be successful in any kind of management, it is absolutely required to use right kind of tools. Right tools add to your productivity, efficiency, and convenience.

MS Project is one such tool which has been designed and developed for managing the projects from planning, scheduling, tracking and replanning perspective. I will be covering some of the aspects of this tool in coming days, however, today’s article only serves as an overview of MS Project.

Any project scheduling/tracking tool operates on three basic parameters – work, duration and resources. This is like a tripod on which entire planning and scheduling is structured. If you change any one of them, it is sure that you’ll need to change at least one other to keep this tripod balanced. E.g. If you change the duration of the task, then either you need to increase the number of resources to meet the new timeline, or you need to ask your resources to work or additional hours everyday to meet the new timelines. If you reduce the work, then either you can reduce the number of resources (or percentage thereof) or you can reduce the duration itself, so that some other task can be accommodated. MS Project also works on these principles.

MS Project allows you to create a blueprint of your project and save it as a “baseline” for all future references. This helps immensely for tracking the project. One can easily see how the project is progressing through the life of that project.

As everyone knows, when working on a project, we divide the project into numerous sub-tasks and many of these are interdependent, either due to the inherent nature of the task or due to requirement of resource with specific skills or simply because there are not sufficient resources to start that task in parallel. In all such cases, you can add the dependencies of various types between the tasks and arrive at a project end date.

Various reports provided by MS Project also come very handy, specifically “WhoDoesWhat”. This particular report tells the reader exactly what is happening on a given date.

Few other things that I would mention is various views which make the job of data entry or data mining pretty easy. Default view is Gantt View. For tracking against baseline, one can use Tracking Gantt, for resources view, there is Resource Sheet and Resource view. For entering actual data day-by-day, one can use Resource Usage view or Task Usage view. In fact, one can create his/her own view to suit the requirements.

I will be covering this tool in-depth as I have used to a large extent (although not extensively) and definitely have some tips and tricks to make your job with MS Project easy. Watch out this space for more.