When it comes to project management, time, quality, and cost are the only three elements that companies and organizations concentrate the most on. The quality of a project is hard to estimate before seeing the final project but it is possible to estimate the costs and time frame for completing the project. To make sure that time is in favor of the project team members, the important events or parts of the project are presented on a chart in chronological order and this presentation is also known as a timeline diagram.
Importance and benefits of Timeline Diagrams:
Besides providing the required results or final product to the client, the most important element of a project is the duration or period in which it needs to be completed. When the finishing of a project on time is so important, the team members can’t lose track of time while working on the project. To simplify the entire process, the whole project is divided into several parts or steps and each step is shown on the timeline diagram along with the required duration to complete it. This way it is easy to calculate the required time for the entire project by adding up the time for each part of the project.
If the time is in favor of the team, they can continue working on the project but if the timeline diagram shows that it needs more time to complete the project than initially expected, the team members and project manager have enough time to think of cutting some time short and completing the project on time. As this all happens before starting the actual project, this means that even if the project setup needs to be changed for timely completion, it can also be done with timeline diagrams.
Here is a preview of a Free Sample Timeline Diagram Template created using MS Word,
Application of Timeline Diagrams in Business:
Due to the versatile nature of this technique of presenting data simply and easily, this tool is used in several fields and areas including business and education. In education, the timeline serves as the representation of the historical events in chronological order so that the students can easily understand how those events happened. It is really easy to present the events and their duration or span on the same chart as the gaps on the timeline between the events represent the real duration or separation between the events.
The most important use or application of timeline diagrams is in project management. Businesses and organizations handle dozens of projects regularly and it is really important that when many projects are continuing simultaneously, the team members for each project understand the sequence and how each milestone in the project has to be done. With timeline diagrams, it is really easy to illustrate the important steps or parts of the project along with their importance or significance and the required duration to complete them. This presentation is also used for another purpose of presenting the manner of the steps or parts of a project in which they need to be done. This is a typical manner in which the first step needs to be completed before the second step can start.
Here is the download link for this Timeline Diagram Template,
