Time Plan

 

First the direction, then the appointment

Individual events like meetings we plan directly on a calendar. For appointments in a project schedule, the situation is different: First, we should gain clarity about our goals and the individual steps that lead us there. Only then we decide when we will tackle these tasks. In meineZIELE's schedule view, a single click is enough to set an appointment.

The project's point of view

When your goals get larger, the shape of your task list changes: Instead of unrelated individual tasks you will have groups of tasks and sub tasks. And in addition to your spheres of influence you will have new top level entries in your goals collection: Projects.

Projects can be quite small, for instance the creation of a pond in your garden. And of course, projects can be very large. Think about the construction of a motorway bridge or the Apollo project. While one needs complex control and optimization tools for large projects, the tools required for small projects often do not exceed what you have already found in meineZIELE.

The larger a project, the more important is the view of the temporal sequence of the project's individual steps. How does a project develop? To see this, professional project managers use the Gantt chart. In a simplified form this is available in meineZIELE's schedule way as well.

As indicated, the schedule view can be used to simplify the collection of events. However, the main application is the representation of interacting tasks, especially multi-day planning as shown below. Of course, the example schedule also serves for the representation of your holiday planning and much more.

Settings

The schedule carries a lot of information, as shown in the figure. A number of days, limited by the width of your screen are visible. The color of the column indicates weekends, holidays and month changes. Whole months are shown alternately light and dark. Planned events are indicated by colored strips (2).

At (3) you set what shall be represented by a column: Day, week, month, ... Move the time scale with the triangles at (1).

If a day is considered (1), the beginning and end of the working day can be adjusted with the triangles (2).

Creating events

New events are created by clicking on the schedule at the desired entry and date. For multi-day events, hold the mouse down and move the cursor to the left or right. Once created an event, you can shorten, lengthen or move it with the mouse. If you press the "Shift" key while moving the event, all subsequent events are moved together.

Move the mouse over the plan to get the following information:

// Date and calendar week of the day
// Begin, end and durance of an event
// All events of a day

For holiday planning, several people could be registered, as shown in the screenshot. As you can see, Frau Maier will take two holidays. Then, one creates individual entries for each holiday. The strips represent the holidays of each one.

As soon as you collapse the main entry (Urlaub), all the sub entries are transferred to the main entry and shown in dark color. Of course, the colors are adjustable in the calendar settings.

To move from one day to the prior or next, use the triangles in the top line.

Gantt charts

With project management, things are a little more complicated because individual steps of the project depend on each other. As long as a wall is not yet built, no electrical installations can be done. The larger a project, the more important is the adequate representation of these dependencies. At small projects, dependencies are often controllable without graphical support. Then you should pass on graphical representations. A chart is best if you can leave out anything.

In some aspects, the Gantt chart is outdated. It was developed before the First World War for the use on paper. What is self-evident on your computer screen, such as collapsing sub tasks or moving events on the calendar, was not possible in those days. For small projects, you should disengage yourself from formal constraints and focus on what is relevant to success.

In contrast, for large projects one tries to determine the "critical path" from the complex composition of many dependencies. Any timeout on this path would delay the entire project. If e.g. masonry works are not on schedule at a construction site, this will delay all other works from carpenter to painter. meineZIELE is best for small and medium-sized projects. For large and complex projects you will not only need a project management tool like MS Project, but also a lot of expertise and accurate and reliable planning data.

For smaller projects, as they are mapped with meineZIELE, it is enough just to see where such dependencies are and whether they are possibly violated by the current planning. These dependencies you create by dragging an element to its logical successor with the mouse. If the timing is violated, then the arrow is automatically displayed in red.

Deleting a connection occurs when you click on the starting point of the arrow while holding down the "Ctrl" key. These links are also visible in the 1-click-filing and can be deleted there.

Sometimes, one also faces the opposite situation: Too many tasks were started at the same time. One would like to visualize the progress of each task. For this purpose, one uses the degree of completion. This can be adjusted in the details of each entry. The easiest way is to click on the item while holding down the "Ctrl" key.

In the example below, (1) is the present day. The task "Schulung" (training) is on schedule and could be completed today. The degree of completion is shown only if you activate the respective button, as indicated in the screenshot on the right.

Next: Work breakdown structure