How do you put together a timeline for a team project?

Question

I'm the leader of a 9 people team. I was told by my professor to put together a schedule/timeline so we all know what's due when. I haven't been able to do this since I needed to find out certain information from the rest of the team otherwise the dates I would assign wouldn't make any sense.

Am I supposed to just put it all together with tentative dates and just change dates once I find out what are the realistic due dates? Should I also write down what tasks are supposed to begin on certain dates as well as their due date?

I find it really difficult to put this down into words/schedule since it feels like we are playing it by ear since we need the team's input for a lot of these decision.

We got in trouble today for not having the timeline ready, we are one our 5th week of the project for which we only meet 2 times a week.

What's the best way to do this?

I don't have microsoft project. I wish it was something I was as familiar with as word or powerpoint.

Answer 1

Of course you need team input.

You need a list of all the steps that must be done to complete the project - then you need to figure out what tasks need to be done before others can be done. Then you'd put times on each task. The team together should develop the list of tasks, the dependencies, and time estimates for each task. Then you'd need to decide who is going to do each task - be careful that one person doesn't have 300 hours of work to do in one week.

After you have all of this put together, it falls into a timeline, which is basically a schedule. The timeline will show both start dates and end dates.

Answer 2

For one, you need to exchange e-mails and phone numbers and call each other. If everyone has access to three way calling, or the majority of the team does, then you can create a mini conference line and discuss everything that way at certain times. You also need to make two timelines. One, as you said, just kind of wing it for the teacher...and another for your team. Make specific dates and times for people to turn in their current work, information, and such. Then, you can take that and make a better timeline for your project since you know when information should be turned into the team, and you can give yourself two or so days from that day for any mishaps or things that may need to be fixed. Also, try looking up timelines for the certain type of project you are doing on a search engine like www.ask.com. I wish you the best of luck and hope that my reply made sense! = )

Answer 3

Do you have a copy of Microsoft Project available to you? Maybe through your university? It is very good for setting up multiple series of tasks and for linking the start of dependent tasks to the performance of the independent tasks. My company has a whole division of employees that use this product to schedule projects and track performance.