by Regulatory & More Jun 17, 2022

How to Create a Project Timeline in Simple Steps?

Step 1 - Create a Project Brief

This step needs to figure out the “What You Want To Do?”.

The project brief is your roadmap. It explains at a glance, the purpose, goals, milestones, and vision of the overall project.

Questions to have in mind:

What are the goals of the project?
What are the stakeholders involved in the project? (both internal and external)
What are the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders?
What is the timeframe of the project?
What are the key milestones of the project?

Step 2 - Create Project Workstreams and Assign Action Items to Them

This step needs to figure out the “Who is Doing What?”.

Project workstreams will help you to segregate the action items in groups and to know who is in charge of what (action owner).

Actions items (also called “To-Dos”, “Actionable Steps”, “Tasks”) can be breake down in sub-action items if necessary (e.g. for complex action item).

A project workstream could be as an example Regulatory, Design & Development or Marketing.

For the Regulatory Workstream, action items could be as an example Preparation of the Technical Documentation, Review of Labeling, Creation of the Intended Use.

Step 3 - Allocate an amount of time for each Action Item to be Completed

This step needs to figure out the “By When?”.

Estimating how much time is needed for each action item will help you to understand in how much time in total the project needs to be completed (overall time).

e.g.

Technical Documentation Creation (7 weeks)
- Creation of the templates (1 weeks)
- Data Compilation (4 weeks)
- Review (2 weeks)
Regulatory Submission (1 week)

Step 4 - Map the dependencies

Assigning potential dependencies between action times and knowing the sequence (order) of each action item will help you to understand which of them need to be completed first, which of them cannot be started or completed until another step is finished.

Step 5 - Create your Project Timeline, Share it and Manage it

NOT GOING to Excel or Powerpoint for creating your project timeline will help you to save a lot of time and energy, as none of these two programs have been designed for project management or project planning. Which is not the case for VisualMaker.

VisualMaker has design and developed a unique template for Project Timeline creation which can help you to communicate before around your project.

Give a look on how to create a Project Timeline with VisualMaker.