Hello and welcome to this short video lecture.
The lecture is a part of Unit 4- The profession,
Element 1- Personal skills.
My name is Tatjana Knapp and I will speak
about time and work management skills.
You know how it is:
The day is short and work lasts a long time.
At least that is what a Hebrew proverb says.
If we have the right tools,
we can efficiently master the skills
of time and work management.
There are many manual and electronic,
offline and online tools out there.
Which one is the right one for you?
Work management can apply
to managing either individual or team
workflows and workload.
Furthermore, it applies to organizations and projects.
In recent decades, the word ‘project management pops up frequently.
Project management is similar to work management but applies to projects,
meaning to a series of tasks that lead to specific outcomes.
Project management is the application of processes, methods, skills, knowledge
and experience to achieve specific project objectives.
It has restricted time and budget.
Then there is task management.
Task management is important when a project is divided into smaller pieces.
It makes the project more manageable.
Do you ever make to-do lists?
Those are a type of task management tools.
But let us take a step back and examine the starting position.
As a manager, you will be responsible for the project management
and within that, the task management.
You will need full insight into the phases,
tasks and the project progress.
It is essential for you to have
good project management tools.
There is a lot of software available to use offline or online.
If you are a facilitator,
an author of easy to understand information
or a validator,
all you need in this aspect is a good task management tool
and possibly some communication tools.
The latter is especially important for facilitators and validators
working together long distance, not physically sharing the working premises.
For project managers,
some essential features of their project management tools
should be planning and scheduling,
team collaboration,
time tracking,
reporting,
budgeting,
billing, and quotes, etc.
Select a tool that has the possibility of gantt charts and different templates.
Scheduling is when we assign order and specific dates to a plan.
It is a very important process for the project manager.
Working in project management,
you will come across terms such as workflow, critical path, priorities,
dependencies, deadline reminders, and adjusting.
In projects, good communication is very important.
You might want to use different online and offline communication tools,
such as chat and messaging tools,
email, phone, face-to-face applications
or conference applications.
If different team members are working together on documents and share them,
your best bet are document collaboration and file sharing tools
in a so called '''cloud service'',
such as Microsoft One Drive, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
One can track the work time manually
and write down the respective dates and the hours
but nowadays, many online applications are available.
Some of the important features
that a good time tracking application should have
are real-time tracking,
the possibility of manual editing,
reporting, exporting data, etc.
Examples of time tracking applications are Toggl track or Everhour,
which are free of charge for up to 5 users.
For the reporting phase of your work,
you wish to have some of the following features:
clean and easy user interface,
the ability to pull data from different sources
and integration with other tools you might be using.
Various types of tools will help you make clear as one can,
for example, choose between dashboard software,
data visualization software,
scorecard tools or ad-hoc report writers.
For budgeting and billing your clients,
the most essential feature out of everything you are going for
should be trustworthiness.
You need to make sure that the level of security remains high.
Lock up those manually filled-in papers and spreadsheets
or use highly protected budgeting applications.
Finally, we come to task management,
which is or can be a part of a project.
Regardless of whether you are a project manager
or just a worker who wants to keep their work track in order,
you want to make sure that your tool comes with essential features
such as a calendar, prioritizing feature, time estimation feature,
collaboration feature, etc.
A good tool for task management includes to-do lists,
the possibility of real-time updates, (email) alerts, etc.
A word of advice -
use tools with multiple features.
Online tools like Trello or Wrike offer free essential models.
Many renowned tools, such as Microsoft Project,
offer several pricing models
and introduce several other features
that we did not cover in this video lecture.
These tools are listed as examples
and are not to be taken as recommendations by the EASIT project team.
Thank you for joining me in this video lecture.
If you have any questions or comments regarding the content,
feel free to contact me through email.
The email address is tatjana@risa.si.