Right Information, Right Time, Right Person and in the Right Way
You have a project, you need Executive support for that project and the Executives want to know what is happening to the investment in change that they have approved through that project, but they are busy. You are busy as well, of course, but they are really busy. The challenge is to communicate the right way but so many project managers communicate the wrong way, or try to and spectacularly fail in their efforts.
A well-known project management law, Cohn’s law, sums this up so well. ‘The more time you spend in reporting on what you are doing, the less time you have to do anything. Stability is achieved when you spend all your time doing nothing but reporting on the nothing you are doing’.
Putting together fantastically accurate and detailed reports and sending them to anyone and everyone, is most definitely not communicating, especially if the ‘Right Person’ happens to be an Executive. They won’t be read, no one has the time or interest to do this, and they won’t be valued and worse, when they do contain project critical information, they will be ignored. You are wasting your time, you aren’t wasting anyone else’s time because they won’t be read, but you are definitely wasting your time. Reporting is not communicating.
So what is the answer?
Keep it simple! Keep is short! Keep it relevant! And keep it visual!
My friends from Timeline have some useful thoughts along these lines:
Gantt Chart and Timeline Maker for Business Presentations
Creating unique, impressive business presentations shouldn’t take forever. With Office Timeline, project visuals are generated, customized and updated with only a few clicks.
Professional-Looking Project Visuals Made Effortlessly
No matter the line of work in which a project manager operates, the successful planning and execution of a project is definitely a demanding endeavor. With all the regular reports, product roadmaps and high-level presentations required of project planners, even the most experienced ones find effectively communicating project plans to be time-consuming and daunting without the proper means.
To meet the need for a simple yet efficient project management visualization tool, Bellevue-based software company Office Timeline has developed a desktop add-in that anyone can use to generate summary views of Gantt charts and timelines right inside PowerPoint. Launched in 2012, the Office Timeline add-in already reached 1 million downloads by 2015 and it is currently used by over 50% of the Fortune 500 companies.
User-Friendly Interface, Impactful Results
Unlike other similar project software that often proves burdensome to use or produces an output too complicated to be showcased to prospects and managers, the app is developed as an extension for PowerPoint, one of the most popular presentation programs used for business presentations. Apart from the seamless integration with PowerPoint, Office Timeline also comes with a gallery of pre-formatted templates and styles, which enables the fast creation of familiar project visuals as native PowerPoint slides that customers, teams and stakeholders can easily follow and understand.
Explore Timelines You Can Create with the Add-In
With an intuitive interface and smart layout engine that optimizes space and automates processes, the PowerPoint timeline maker allows users to instantly build professional-looking graphics that are easy to share and update on the fly, saving time and effort.
Providing a clean, simple way to present project plans and schedules, Office Timeline comes as a freemium product with a perpetually free version and a Plus one.
The free edition is fully functional and fit for creating and editing simple visuals fast. Users simply need to download the add-in to instantly start building their first graphic.
See How Easy Is to Get Started
The Plus edition gives users access to powerful features, such as the ability to customize graphics to the smallest details and update them instantly, and to import data from Project management programs like Excel, Microsoft Project, Wrike and Smartsheet. This means more time saved in building distinctive project visuals that will impress the audience.
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