Some people hate deadlines, whereas others thrive on them. It makes them work a lot harder because they know something needs to be completed by a specific date otherwise it’s a resounding failure.
Money will be lost and upper-management won’t be happy. What about when things are going wrong? What about if you have a deadline you need to meet only you have fallen behind and you don’t know if you’ll be ready one time?
This is where you need someone that is great at managing projects. Hopefully that is you because you will need to do something about it. You will need to make crucial changes that will help the project get back on track because you don’t want to suffer the consequences. We’re going to look at a few things you might do once you realize you’re not going to make the deadline. Hopefully you will know which of these will help your team out the most.
Work longer hours
The first thing you can obviously look at is the amount of time you spend working on the project. If it’s possible to do overtime that might be what you have to do. You only want to work longer hours if you’re already working efficiently.
If you are messing up somewhere then working longer hours only means you’ll be spending more time doing more of the wrong things.
Move your resources around
If you have a few people on one particular task you might be able to take some people away and put them on another task. You just need to make sure the people you leave on the first task are still capable of doing their job properly.
You can move resources around every day, but you will need to evaluate everything on a constant basis so you know you’re using your resources efficiently.
Jobs worked on in parallel
You can’t start decorating a bathroom until you build the foundations of the house. Obviously some jobs will need to be completed first before anything else is started, but there will be some jobs you can run in parallel.
If you weren’t due to begin working on something for a few weeks you might be able to start early if it can be worked on right now.
Find a way to save time
There will always be some tasks that take an exact length of time to complete. Maybe you will need to send people away on a training course that lasts for X amount of days.
When you send a piece of mail it might take X days to arrive. Is there any way you can reduce the number of people attending the training courses? Can you pay more and send the mail as urgent?
Can you outsource part of it? Find some help! Relying on yourself is one of the biggest mistakes teams make, according to Shout Digital.
Work on important tasks first
Some tasks will obviously be mission critical and you want those to be completed in plenty of time.
As the deadline approaches you don’t want to be working on your most important tasks because everyone will be running around like a headless chicken. Towards the end of each project you only want to be walking around tying up loose ends.
Improve your processes
There is always a faster way to do something and you just need to find out how it can be done. Speak to everyone who is working on the project because they do the groundwork every single day.
They will know if something they do at the moment could be done faster. Implement the changes and the project will be finished with plenty of time to spare.
Automating part of your work is almost always a good idea, especially if you use smart automation. For example, you can automate email marketing or workflow.
Everything can be improved
You’ve been given a deadline and everything needs to be done by a certain date. It can be done and you just need to figure out how.
You’ve been given some great information today that will help you change things around, so now you just need to go and finish your project in style.
Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay