Remote operations have been around for a while, and recent global developments have shown that companies and organisations can get things done by relying on remote workers and teams. This trend will only get entrenched further in work dynamics. The flexibility remote work gives to professionals pushes people to seek arrangements that involve working off-site, remotely. On an organisation scale, you have various employees from a number of places coordinating projects online. Here is where a time management action plan comes in.
When supervising a team working remotely on a particular project, how you structure and allocate time is crucial to the achievement of set goals and objectives. For instance, if you are developing software, you have to set clear timelines for the entire development process culminating in software deployment. Instituting a time management action plan equips you with a tool to use to plan for execution. It becomes easier to meet targets in a timely fashion. Moreover, for administration and operations purposes, a time management action plan for remote teams can help cut the operational friction with remote work.
OUTLINE THE MODALITIES
A time management action plan is usually put in place to help accelerate and coordinate efforts towards attaining set goals and targets. The activities and operations on which you are designing the action plan are the first and most essential parts of writing a time management action plan for your remote teams. You need to ensure that you have a good understanding of the project in question and how you need to allocate time across various members of your remote team or teams.
Outlining these activities will allow you to create relevant time allocations, letting you make progress towards your goals. You can choose to assign tasks to individual members or to a remote team as a whole, giving you options to build your time management action plan.
SET MILESTONES
You have to ensure that you set milestones, targets, and thresholds to be met within specific time blocks throughout the execution and management of the project at hand. Likewise, you can set up performance indicators or other equivalent measurements, that will serve as a yardstick for allocating time to team members and teams.
When you put in place milestones and performance indicators, you can calculate reasonable timeframes for execution. You can then analyze how to break down the work and time to the teams, which essentially forms the backbone in crafting a time management action plan.
CONSIDER BREAKS AND OTHER PAUSES IN WORKFLOW
A good time management action plan considers that people working remotely need some breaks from work to refresh their minds. To tap into the most productive hours with your team or teams, ensure you schedule blocks of time separated with breaks and intervals. Team members can use these breaks to take showers, grab a snack, stretch outside in the open air, or any other form of relaxing activity. Such breaks are essential to your team members’ psyche, which is a plus as far as overall project execution goes.
START WITH DAILY TIME MANAGEMENT ACTION PLANS
In most cases, time management action plans cover extended periods of time, like a month or two or an entire quarter or half of the year. For that much time, straight-out writing of a time management action plan for the whole period might be challenging. However, all this changes when you break down the work and start handling daily time management action plans.
Crafting daily plans allows you to be able to build weekly plans, bi-weekly plans, and monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly plans. Therefore, in writing a time management action plan, an elaborate and straightforward way of getting it done is getting granular by developing daily time management action plans that will help build the desired action plan for the intended time.
LEVERAGE THE POWER OF TEMPLATES
Whether in report writing or software development, templates provide people with tools to work with and steps to follow to get to an intended outcome. The upside of using templates is that most of the heavy lifting gets done for you – and what you do is utilize the outline and structure of the template to get your work done.
For a time management action plan, chances are that there are templates available based on others’ earlier works on action plans spanning different periods. This is what you can leverage to build and write your time management action plan for deployment elsewhere in your projects. Other than templates, professional writers can also help with a major part of the work. Most folks seek this form of help from a writing service, and they do get around a writing assignment they have and are unable to complete due to some reasons they know best. The kind of assistance they access includes:
- Research and actual writing help.
- Help with editing.
- Proofreading assistance.
This fits the bill here with a time management action plan – and in a similar fashion, there are avenues for seeking writing assistance.
TAILOR THE PLAN ACCORDING TO THE CAPABALITIES OF THE TEAM MEMBERS
You want to ensure that the time management action plan plays into the capabilities of the team members. To get around under-delivery, ensure that you synchronize your action plan with the individual capability of your remote team members. This is an accurate method of getting the most out of your remote operations supporting your project. Gaining operational insight into how your team works can allow you to assign and allocate time in the most efficient way possible for maximum productivity, output, and delivery.
To sum this up, you have to ensure that you have information regarding the operational efficiency of your team. You need to know how your team works – its strengths and weaknesses. Having the relevant information places you in a position of advantage when writing a time management action plan for remote operations. You can use this information to create an action plan that reflects your team’s operational strength and capabilities. This will also help you steer clear of awkward situations where you have tasks, but people inadequately equipped to handle them.
Ready to become a stellar manager for your remote team?
Author: Jessica Fender – Chief Content Officer, Online Writers Rating & Contributor.