How to Create a Project Calendar

In the dynamic world of agency projects, maintaining a comprehensive calendar is crucial – for both your internal team and clients.

Handling multiple client projects can mean several deadlines, ranging from daily to quarterly, to annually and everything in between. To make matters worse, the high-energy nature of an agency also means that some of these deadlines might shift on the fly. That’s why project calendars are such a key part of managing all the moving parts of an agency’s work.

Many people in digital project management find the task of building a calendar to be time consuming and tedious. It can be hard to know how to organize tasks and even harder to align your calendar with your teams’. And, much like communication channels, the platform options for building and maintaining your calendar are endless.

All of these factors mean that sometimes professionals in digital project management don’t use calendars as thoroughly as they could. Here’s how to make yours awesome.

Understand the limits of desktop platforms

Many moons ago, Microsoft Excel was the go-to platform for setting up a project calendar. The program comes with a built-in calendar template, and since Excel is a pretty universal program, it’s not hard to get your team on board. The problem with any desktop-based calendar, however, is that there’s no centralized version.

If you and your team members are looking at an Excel calendar, you’re all viewing separate versions. If anyone wants to make changes, they have to upload a new version, and, if multiple team members are doing this, all these changes somehow have to be compiled into a new iteration completely. You can see how this is not only a waste of time and resources, but makes it likely that something will slip through the cracks.

Desktop calendars also don’t allow you to see who has access to the document and who has made changes to information. This makes it hard to hold people accountable and increases the risk of a security breach.

Decide how many calendars you need and how to divide them

When it comes to project management for agencies, you might have a single, overarching calendar showing all your tasks on the go. It’s equally likely, however, that you’ll want more than one. You might need to compare these side-by-side, so it’s crucial to choose a method of categorizing your calendars and to keep consistent with it.

You can choose to make a calendar based on project, so that each main project has its own timeline with milestones and deadlines clearly indicated. When you compare calendars for more than one project, you can manage your resources better, anticipating heavier workloads or multiple deadlines in a short period.

Some people also choose to give each team member a calendar, instead of organizing by project. This allows anyone in digital project management to compare workloads and anticipate which team members can take on other tasks if needed.

Leave room for change

The dynamic nature of an agency means that deadlines and requirements often shift without notice. To head this off, you might want to work some soft deadlines into your projects, which gives your team some buffer time for certain milestones.

If you’re using task management software, switching up calendar items is a breeze. Just drag and drop. You can tag team members to let them know about the schedule change or set it up so that entire teams get notified automatically.

Most agencies require at least some elements of Agile methodology to function effectively. Between unexpected client requests, technical challenges or other outside forces, even the most organized calendars need a bit of wiggle room, so make sure you plan for change from the outset.

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In the world of project management for agencies, keeping track of tasks, deadlines and team members is crucial. Make full use of a digital project calendar and you’ll find everything runs much more smoothly.