What is a timeline creator and how they can help with project management

Project managers are struggling to meet deadlines.

A 2020 survey of 111 organizations revealed that only 29% completed a majority of their projects on time.

Project delays cost companies money, not just because of the potential loss of clients, but also because of the increased work hours while trying to play catch up.

Having a clear project timeline is one way for PMs to easily track project progress and immediately address any issues that may cause delays.

Instead of spending hours every day drawing and editing a project timeline manually, PMs can use an online timeline maker to create a versatile, customizable, and automatically-updated timeline where every task and milestone is visible.

To help PMs stay on top of their projects, we’ve explained how to create useful timelines online. We’ve also explained what to look for in a timeline creator and how monday.com can help.

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What is a project timeline creator?

A project timeline is a visual representation of all the tasks in your project in chronological order.

With the right timeline generator, you can visualize tasks, edit them to add relevant details, and reschedule them with a few clicks.

Advanced timeline creators enable users to group tasks by assignees, their status, relevance in the workflow, and deadlines.

These additional features significantly boost project management, with managers and team members gaining clarity on their tasks and how they impact the overall project. Added clarity means enhanced team communication and collaboration.

How to create a project timeline

There are 8 basic steps you can use to create an efficient project timeline:

1. Create a project brief: create a basic project overview that includes goals, timeframes, budget, and team members.
2. Breakdown the work process: list the work involved in the project, broken down into tasks and milestones.
3. Define workflow: use the list to define the stages in your workflow. Workflows can be as straightforward or as complex as you need.
4. Estimate tasks: estimate how much time each task requires and what resources it needs. In the initial stages, you can have basic estimates. For example, all content tasks will be in the project’s production stage, and each of them could take 2 days to complete.
5. Create task dependencies: identify how tasks affect one another and link crucial tasks to create task dependencies.
6. Estimate time needed: use task time estimates, resource availability, dependencies, and team capacity to determine how you’re going to pace out the project’s work.
7. Identify milestones: milestones can be short-term goals, important events, or quantities of key deliverables.
8. Create your timeline: use all the above information to create one overarching timeline. Often this is done by inputting all the above data into a project management tool like Gantt chart software. Then you can easily click a button to turn it into a pretty visual timeline of your project (or at least you can with our platform…)

What to look for in a timeline creator

Timeline creators can be standalone tools with one main functionality, or they can be one of many features offered in a Work Operating System (OS) like monday.com.

To help you choose the right creator, here are 5 key features that a timeline software must include:

#1. A dynamic interface

Your timeline creation software must help you build a timeline in minutes so that you can move on to other important aspects of project management – scheduling, task management, resource management, and team management.

On monday.com, for example, you can develop a project board using pre-defined templates and then automatically visualize it in the form of a timeline.

#2. Easy re-scheduling

Free timeline creators allow you to update your project timelines – they just take a lot longer to do so.

Since most free tools let users build and then download an image of their timelines, any changes require manual editing and re-download. So, you have to spend quite a long time moving all your tasks individually when circumstances change.

This is why paid software takes the cake.

Any changes to the timeline are automatically reflected on all board views on monday.com in real-time. Moreover, you can reschedule tasks in groups, and include their task dependencies as well.

#3. Task management

This brings us to the next element – task management. If you only need task titles and dates, then a free tool might be enough, but for complex project management, you need to see all task details at a glance.

On monday.com project timelines, clicking on a task cell shows you all the relevant details, so you don’t have to juggle between multiple windows/platforms to monitor and manage tasks.

#4. Milestones

Milestones are a critical project management element. They indicate project progress. Any timeline software you choose must let you add milestones.

Like tasks and deadlines, your milestones will change throughout your project.

Maybe your team missed the deadline, or you realized you expected too much for this stage of the project – whatever the reason, milestones change, and your PM software must allow you to reflect these changes quickly.

#5. Money, money, money

Capterra’s 2019 report revealed that price was the third-most important factor when companies were choosing PM software. It’s fair to say that the same applies for timeline creators.

PMs can choose between free timeline creators, but these are usually intended for one-time use, like presentations or school projects.

That being said, getting the best timeline software doesn’t have to be a headache for your accounting team.

monday.com offers comprehensive timeline management features with the added benefits of a centralized work hub with everything you need in one place – all at a reasonable price.

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The right timeline creator for project management in 2021

After researching all the above factors, it becomes evident that monday.com is the perfect timeline creator for project management in 2021.

It has an endless list of features and lets you manage your team and project portfolio in a centralized hub.

monday.com boasts an automatic interactive timeline creator for any project. You can visualize all the tasks in your project board in the form of a timeline or 8 other views.

Here’s why we beat competitors every single time:

• User-friendly interface: monday.com is geared to suit every team, whether it’s their first project or the 1,000th. The platform’s intuitive interface makes it easy to add, edit, and track tasks using a timeline.
• Templates for every project: if you don’t know where to start or want a quick set up, monday.com offers hundreds of templates that are customizable to suit every project.
• Quick and efficient: timelines and project boards work together on monday.com. Users can add and visualize tasks on both the project board or the timeline. Any updates are automatically synced between both views. You can also add task dependencies.
• Easy edits: task details – assignees, descriptions, files, checklists, etc.- can be edited by clicking on the task’s bar. Extend or shorten task bars to edit dates.
• Milestones: monday.com lets you mark a task as a milestone in just 2 clicks – right click on a task and check the “Set as Milestone” box. Your project can have as many milestones as you want.
• Effective collaboration: a dynamic timeline means every team member is aligned towards project goals. To streamline communication, every task on monday.com has real-time comments and integrates with third-party apps.
• Workload management: group tasks by who they are assigned to. This segregation enables project managers to avoid work overload. You can also use monday.com’s Dashboard for practical resource and budget management.

Those are just the features related to timeline creation. monday.com offers 9 project views, including Kanban, Calendar, List, and Gantt. All of these are just as easy to create and customize.

You can unlock all these features and take project management to the next level by opting for one of our 4 plans – Basic, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. There’s also a free plan for individuals.

Final thoughts

Timeline makers are essential for project management, and choosing the right one can make life easier for every project manager.

A standalone timeline creator might work for individual projects. But, teams and organizations that want to improve business processes should use a complete Work OS like monday.com.

With our endless customization options, advanced workflow automation, tons of integrations, and hundreds of templates, you’re getting so much more than just a timeline maker.

monday.com can help you streamline and improve not just your timelines, but the entire way you do work.

Discover what our intuitive and user-friendly platform can do for your business.

Try our project timeline template!