Deadline Management: How to Ensure Your Team Delivers on Time
Many factors contribute to a project’s success, and the timely delivery of tasks is one of the most important ones. Sticking to deadlines and providing quality work on time is not easy for everyone, but it’s essential.
Managing deadlines is something every person dreads, the word ‘deadline’ is such that it creates anxiety, and you’re stressed to complete the work within the stipulated time, but it doesn’t have to be so stressful and difficult.
The team’s collective efforts determine a project’s success, so the entire team suffers if even one person lags. This is why it’s important to manage deadlines and ensure that everything is being done on time. It’s because deadlines give you ample time to prepare, schedule your tasks, divide the tasks into small chunks, provide space to doubts, and focus on delivering quality work on time.
Well, it’s easier said than done, so let’s explore some ways to ensure that your team delivers the work on time by managing deadlines.
Ways To Ensure Your Team Delivers The Work On Time
If your team finds it difficult to meet and manage deadlines, then it’s time for you to step in and introduce some changes to help them deliver the work on time.
This is important because deadlines represent discipline, and when the work is time-sensitive, meeting deadlines is a must rather than a choice.
There are many ways to go about it, but here are six of the most effective ones:
- Break Down Tasks For Easy Execution
Every project has specific goals that need to be achieved, and for easy execution, it’s best to divide the goals into small tasks assigned individually to every person in the team. These goals should be measurable and have a realistic timeline.
The tasks should be communicated clearly without any confusion, and each person in the team should know their responsibilities.
Breaking down tasks helps achieve the goal faster because it’s easier to meet the smaller goals since they are right in front of you.
Alternatively, you can communicate the project’s vision to your team and allow them to break it up into smaller tasks and divide the work.
This can be effective because everyone will be taking tasks they are comfortable doing, and this will also increase the team’s efficiency.
Besides dividing the goals into smaller tasks, it’s important to make planning a priority. Everything should be organized and planned to avoid any last-minute confusion. Planning will further ensure that the tasks get completed on time.
- Communicate Expectations Clearly
Communication is the key to managing deadlines. There’s a team hierarchy, and communication may happen horizontally between people at the same level and vertically from managers to junior-level employees.
However, for clear communication, it’s important to have a two-way communication system.
By two-way communication, it means that both parties need to be equally expressive. The manager needs to communicate the deadline, what is expected of the tasks, and set realistic expectations for project success.
On the other hand, the team members need to communicate what resources they need, any problems they’re facing, and relay the project’s progress.
With two-way communication, there is transparency in expectations, responsibilities, and progress. Moreover, the employees feel more motivated and engaged since the whole team is involved.
It also ensures smooth problem-solving and seamless project execution leading to timely delivery of tasks.
- Use An Efficient Project Management Tool
While manual project management and communication works, there are tools that can help you take your organization skills up a notch by keeping everything in one place and making execution easier.
Project management tools allow you to assign tasks, set deadlines, send reminders for deadlines, communicate clear expectations on text with every task, give notes for feedback and especially, track progress.
All this can be quite stressful when you do it manually, but with a tool, you can do it easily while supervising everything and providing help when needed.
- Track Progress Regularly
You can only meet deadlines when you track progress and measure the success of the assigned tasks. If you expect your team to finish the work without any supervision or tracking, you may need to rethink it.
A part of doing the work on time is identifying gaps, filling them up, and regularly tracking progress to see what you’re missing and how much more you need to do to achieve the goal.
You can track progress through project management tools, emails, weekly calls, end-of-day report summaries, and weekly reporting.
Without this, you will not know if the tasks are being completed or any problems that may exceed the deadline.
Besides tracking progress, you also need to provide feedback to your team so they can work on it to improve the output. While meeting deadlines is important, it’s equally essential to maintain the quality of work. So, tracking progress will also help your team improve their performance.
- Find Out Loopholes In Deadline Management, Try To Fix Them
Sometimes, even after you have provided all the necessary information about the project, streamlined project management through tools, and clarified the doubts, a few things don’t work out.
Does this mean your employees are taking it lightly, or is there another problem surfacing? Well, not necessarily.
Chances are that your deadline management has some issues. This is where you need to find out the loophole in your plan and fix it rather than judging your team for not completing tasks on time or facing problems in execution.
You can only fix the problems when you’re involved in the project. You cannot leave it all on the team and expect them to come to you only when the tasks have been completed.
If you want an excellent output submitted before the deadline, you need to be equally involved because only then can you find out what’s wrong and fix it before it creates confusion.
Find out time for small talk and genuinely ask your team if they’re facing any problems. Find solutions together rather than yelling at them because sometimes there are internal team problems that never reach you because the members are hesitant to reach out to you.
Don’t be unapproachable because if you create that kind of environment, you will always find yourself surrounded by miscommunication.
Instead, talk to your team, and regularly engage in informal conversations to understand their problems, after which you can find a solution and fill in the gap.
- Keep Your Team Motivated
Motivation is not constant. It keeps dwindling with time and situations. It’s true that as the motivation goes down, so does the productivity and quality of work because you can’t seem to get the job done.
As a project manager, you can create an environment for your team where they feel motivated from time to time.
A simple appreciation can make your team’s day. They need to feel that their work is acknowledged and appreciated.
You can also host regular awards or give the best performer incentives as a token of appreciation for the work they’ve done. This will boost the other employees, making them want to work even harder to achieve that title. However, it should not be competitive but done in a good spirit to motivate the employees.
Every human being wants to be appreciated for what they do and feel acknowledged for the time they have invested, and that’s exactly what you need to do.
Conclusion
Deadlines don’t have to be as deadly as they sound, but there can be several factors that inhibit your team from reaching those deadlines. It’s important to look out for any problem that arises and fix loopholes whenever you find them.
The key to successful deadline management is communication. The better your communication, the better will be the output with timely delivery.
It’s easy to get stressed about missed deadlines, but if you try to employ the best practices for your team to work on time, you will not have to monitor them all the time or feel anxious when the deadline is about to come.
Author Bio: Adela Belin is a content marketer and blogger at Writers Per Hour. She is passionate about sharing stories with the hope to make a difference in people’s lives and contribute to their personal and professional growth. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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