Planning

In the professional world it is vital to organise your time and money in order to satisfy clients as well as turn a profit. In order to get a job completed by a deadline, we must first plan how we will spend our time based on the requirements of the brief. Provided that you have been in the industry long enough, it should be possible to easily allot time for certain tasks based on past experience. At this point it is also important to take the client’s budget into consideration with how much time you can afford to spend on each stage of the project and whether or not one stage costs more than another.

In terms of visually organising your time, charts are a great means to do it! There are programs available which are dedicated to producing time organisation charts such as Gantt charts that help to address how certain parts of the project are linked and whether or not one part needs to be completed for another to begin. While you are working through your planned project it helps to have some idea how much progress you have made compared to how much is left to do and how little time is left. Perhaps the best means of doing this is setting goals or milestones which give you a shorter time frame to work in and help to break up tasks. It is also easy to forget what is still left to do so regular audits assist you in deciding when to well and truly panic.

Unfortunately our group has not been planning our work within a long term time frame and instead, have been going on a week by week basis. On one hand this method doesn’t warrant any disappointment since there have been no set milestones. However with the lack of milestones we also have little idea of how much we have done compared to how much is still left to do. This week our group performed an audit off the top of our heads of what we still need to work on for the following weeks. We managed to come up with a decent sized list which seemed to shock us all but gave us direction and renewed vigour! I do believe that when we put our model together in week 13 that we will have a lot of unpleasant surprises in things which are yet to be completed.