What are the benefits of work schedules?
In most businesses, teams are tasked with multiple projects every week. Each project has many tasks and milestones that must be completed before clearing the final deadline. As a team manager, a work schedule helps you:
Guide your team members with detailed task and workflow management
Include competing priorities and set realistic deadlines for each weekly sprint
Manage budgets, resources and timetables to keep all projects on track
By creating a work schedule template, your entire team understands the expectations and can focus on delivering the work. This approach helps each team member:
Hold themselves accountable to the task deadlines they’ve been assigned
Look for ways they can complete each task as efficiently as possible
Support their teammates on larger projects with greater dependencies
A project work schedule is a holistic view of all activities, deadlines, deliverables and milestones in a team’s weekly workflow. Using your work schedule template, you’ll create more team and stakeholder alignment while keeping each project on track.
When to use the work schedule template?
The work schedule template is most helpful when:
You have multiple projects to manage each week
Priorities and resources must be set and managed appropriately
Your team members need a master work plan to achieve each project milestone
As the team manager, your task is to oversee the weekly schedule to ensure your team can work productively. Use the work schedule template to:
Assign each task to a team member and brief them on requirements
Identify blockers or competing deadlines to plan work effectively
Track task progress and milestones reached, ensuring important tasks don’t slip through the net
The project work schedule template creates a visual blueprint for several weeks of tasks and priorities. By organizing the workload into weekly sprints and milestones, all team members and stakeholders have a clear overview of expectations, responsibilities and team capacity.
If there are any questions or concerns about the work schedule, you can address them and make any necessary adjustments to the plan. Once the work schedule is complete, all team members and stakeholders can review the weekly milestones and ensure all tasks are completed on time and on budget.
How to use the work schedule template?
The work schedule template is a weekly calendar of tasks, milestones, and deliverables. It provides a quick visual overview of what tasks and milestones are scheduled so that workflows can be managed in the most efficient way to hit those deadlines.
You can also use the template’s built-in Gantt tracker to easily view work in each weekly schedule. Gantt charts are valuable workflow management tools that help all stakeholders understand how much work a team is currently managing, and when deliverables can be expected.
Step 1: Map out the weekly workflow
Begin by creating the vertical sections in your template and map out the work schedule workflow. Remember that your work schedule template is meant to organize project milestones into weekly sprints. Create sections on your template for several weeks that will list all tasks to be completed in those blocks of time. Label the final section as Done to show which tasks and milestones have been achieved.
Keep in mind that some weeks may have lighter workloads than others, and that’s okay. If one of your team members has fewer tasks to manage in a given week, you can assign them any new requests that come from other stakeholders and keep momentum moving forward. Be sure to add any recurring tasks to ensure they’re completed each week.
Step 2: Break down the workload into tasks
Once you have your weekly sections, you can list all tasks in your team’s current workflow. Suppose you work at a healthcare clinic, and your team has been assigned with procuring new equipment, training the staff, and gathering patient feedback on the new experience.
You should have tasks for gathering the equipment, training the staff, managing inventory, sanitizing the equipment, managing insurance, gathering patient feedback, etc. Organize those tasks using your weekly sections to visualize your team’s workflow and manage multiple priorities all at once.
You can create a new task by clicking the + in any board section. Be sure to add a detailed description of the expectations and assign a tag so that the assignee understands the task scope. You can also create checklists for each task to include all the deliverables for the assigned team member.
Step 3: Assign task start and end dates
Once your tasks are listed out on the template, you need to assign dates of delivery so you can set expectations and manage your team’s workload. Referring to the previous example, procuring, installing, using, and gathering feedback on new medical equipment is a large and ongoing undertaking.
Make sure that each weekly section includes a reasonable amount of time for the assigned tasks. You would rather not overpromise and underdeliver what your team’s weekly workflow can deliver.
Review the timeline with your team members and ask if the deadlines are reasonable and achievable. To do this, click the Timeline icon in the top navigation bar and select “Show project timeline.” You’ll see all the start and end dates for each task organized into a horizontal Gantt tracker.
Step 4: Monitor project performance
As tasks are completed, your team can move them to “Done” on the work schedule. The Reports feature in MeisterTask provides an overview of completion dates and task deliverables at a glance. Use these insights to adjust your project timeline and reallocate resources as needed.
