Project Plan

As a marketing consultant, you know that timing is everything. To keep your consulting engagements on track, you need a good project management strategy centered around a solid project timeline. But as many marketing consultants know from experience, developing and adhering to a timeline can be tough. Many marketing consulting engagements seem to have multiple moving parts – from overbooked team members to shifting marketplace priorities to technology limitations – that can create complications and delays.

Nevertheless, project timelines constitute an important first step in time management planning. More than that, they’re an excellent project management tool you can use to educate your client about how you’re working to keep the engagement on-time and on-budget.

Whatever elements a marketing consulting project may involve, a step-by-step project timeline enables marketing consultants to:

o Accurately report to your client on completed tasks, as well as those that are delayed or coming due; [...]

The Gantt chart was developed by the engineer and consultant Henry Gantt (1861-1919) to visually show the scheduled and actual progress of a project, and was an innovative concept at the time. It was used on projects during the First World War and on the project to construct the Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

Today project management is an essential element of all organisations in a variety of industries: engineering, construction, defence, almost any industry you can think of will require projects to be managed at some time. There are a number of internationally recognised methodologies that can be followed to manage a project (such as PMP, PRINCE2 or APMP) each with a different approach and different terminology. But underlying these different methods is the common theme for all projects of the triple constraints of cost, time and scope, and the basics of professional project management.

So just what are the basics?

Initiation Phase: When the scope, objectives and end-product are defined, and the project is formally approved. [...]