Overview

Your applied project needs careful planning and management.  Project management is crucial to your success. Take time to actively review your schedule along with the steps you will need to complete for your project. Add buffer time into the plan as well.  Project management steps will help assist you to complete each phase of your applied project. You should identify a number of key activities that you should include when developing your applied project plan. The key activities, or milestones, should have a hard deadline that you recognize as a clear requirement to meet the goals of this project. 

• Identify the key milestones of your project and map them first.
  • For example, if you are collecting surveys, when do you have to have the survey completed so you have time to have it approved before it launches?
  • For example, if you are conducting a literature review as a method, when would you need to have your article inclusion/exclusion complete in order to start running the study (searching for the articles, then documenting them so you can determine the themes which are required for writing up the results)?
• Identify any key challenges in your path that may contribute to the risk of delays. For this task, you should consider not only your scheduling around milestones but how to build prevention techniques into a project to minimize risk.
• Map out all resources you have and those that you will need (and by when will you need them).

Submission

For this assignment, you will submit a timeline displaying all activities you expect to accomplish for this project and their associated durations. Complete the time frame details. Update the deliverable as it applies to your project (i.e., if it says statistics, you can change that term to analysis or whatever is applicable). 

A few notes:

• You are encouraged to add your start dates, although it is not required.
• Using this tool throughout your project is highly encouraged not only for the benefit of your project but also to practice the industry skill of managing projects successfully.
• See the template attached for outlining your project plan which you can use for this submission.
  • It includes direction on identifying key activities at each stage of the project with possible associated deliverables (outputs) for each.
  • The project timetable allows you to track the start and end of work breakdown tasks.
    • Template HCR 593 – Project Time Table .xlsxDownload HCR 593 – Project Time Table .xlsx
• You may create your own as long as it contains the deliverables listed in the template provided. 

Do not be misled by the small number of points assigned to this submission. Lack of submission is not an option. This is a contributing step toward the ultimate goal of the overall project. Steps such as these are understood in the industry and by researchers to be critical for planning and executing a project, and without proper planning, it could impact small or very large portions of your project. Lack of planning significantly contributes to increased stress and frustration, especially in the second half of the project.