Project calendars are essential for planning the next month, quarter, and year. Creating a project management calendar can take a long time, and some deadlines change before you’re done.
The madness doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve created your calendar, how do you align your plans with other teams’ calendars?
If this struggle sounds familiar, it’s time to find a way to tackle the chaos and easily share project calendars between teams.
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Project planning with Excel
Excel is a default project planning tool because it is familiar to many people. Formatting calendars in Excel is easy thanks to its native table view.
Excel has a default project calendar template, it will vary over time when creating one from scratch, and you will easily skip the schedule. The good news is that an Excel chart was used to plan the project schedule, and I will probably join your team as soon as possible to edit this document.
However, using Excel spreadsheets as project calendar management means that everyone should see and edit separate files. It will change the calendar, upload the latest version of the parrot separately, and finally consolidate this version into one.
While adding a complete calendar or creating a work schedule in Excel is easy, collaborating around a shared project manager calendar is difficult. Managing tasks within Excel is also a challenge. Spreadsheets are simply a breeding ground for outdated information and security breaches because there is no way of knowing who has access to them and what changes have been made.
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Project planning with Google Calendar
An online calendar similar Google Calendar is a good solution for the team that wants to collaborate on project planning in real time. Selecting how to use Google Calendar for project management? Check out what LifeHacker.com has articulated for information on how to manage project scheduling through Google Calendar.
Google Calendar is super flexible. You agree to create multiple calendars and view them at the same time or one there. You can organize your calendars in two ways:
By Assignee – Create a separate calendar for a team member and enter the due date for the task in this personal calendar. Team leaders can review and upload the work of each team member or multiple team members to see what deadlines are approaching.
By Project – Create a separate calendar for the team’s main project and enter the due date for the project’s task and gems. Take on project planning and that will need to change for heavy tasks or high priority workloads.
Google Calendar is an effective way to collaboratively plan projects, it is mainly used for meeting scheduling.
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Project planning with Wrike calendars
If you’re looking for a way to collaboratively plan projects and link release dates with underlying work, Wrike’s calendars are the best way to create a calendar for your team.
Wrike calendars provide a high-level view of scheduled tasks by day, week, month, or year. Scheduled tasks contain all related information, files and conversations, making it easy to switch directly from calendar to work. Drag and drop the task onto the calendar to change two dates and all dependent tasks will follow suit.
Having an activity calendar to share and manage time allows you to view and project plans not only for your team, but for other teams as well. Whether it’s blog posts alongside product launches or upcoming event-based email campaign initiatives for customers, Wrike makes it easy to align efforts and find deadlines in a vacuum.
Do you want to see your calendar in a different way? Try using interactive Gantt charts.
The Gantt chart was a timeline visualization of all ongoing projects and deadlines. I show the duration of the activity, I link it to the dependencies of the activities, I write down those assigned to the activities and I face the progress with the critical path of the projects. You can also view multiple projects on the same Gantt chart to see which ones overlap.
Which project planning calendar is right for you?
From Excel worksheets to Gantt charts, there are many different ways to create a project calendar. It is up to you and your team to decide which is the most efficient and effective method for your needs.
As you consider which method is right for you, check out these additional resources on how to create a project planning calendar.
Also Read: How to set up an organizational structure
