As a project manager, we are asked to do so much. We are asked to complete a schedule, allocate resources, estimate the costs, understand the abilities of our employees and schedule the durations of different activities based on that understanding. And we do all of this with our client or supervisor keeping a watchful eye over us and making sure that we come under budget.
In order to be successful, the Project manager needs to be able coordinate everything and everyone who is taking part in the production. One way to do this is through the use of Gantt Charts. A Gantt chart is a “type of bar chart that displays project activities as bars measured against a horizontal time scale. It is the most popular way of exhibiting sets of related activities in the form of schedules.”(Portny) One free online tool that can be very helpful is the website smartsheets.com. SmartSheets allows the PM to create a Gantt charts that meet the needs of everyone working with the project. “You can customize your chart with conditional formatting to highlight team members' tasks or indicate status levels with different colors. Your team or clients will instantly "get it" and understand the tasks and related dependencies.”(SmartSheet) Not only does this website give the Project Manager the ability to build Gantt charts to plan out a project, by inviting all team to join, the site allow multiple opportunities for team members to collaborate with others and makes it easy for them to share files. Include the web forums and mobile apps they offer, and Smart Sheets provides project managers with a single place for team members to look and understand where their at any point during the project.
One of the real problems that project managers have to deal with is their ability to work with the schedules of every team member. A free online tool that helps Project Managers with this is Doodle.com. Doodle.com is an online app that allows the Project manager to schedule with several people working on a variety of different platforms. Doodle.com cooperates with calenders such as gmail, yahoo, and even Macintoshish’s Ical, and thus allows the Project manager to schedule meetings and any other calender activity with the easy of a mouse click, regardless of the phone, tablet or computer that the team member is working with. “Doodle radically simplifies the process of scheduling events, whether they’re board or team meetings, dinners with friends, reunions, weekend trips, or anything else.” (Doodle)
Product Tours - Gnatt Charts, smartsheet.com, retrieved 4/01/14 from http://www.smartsheet.com/product-tour/gantt-charts
Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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