How can you manage your time as a consultant in process automation?

Setting realistic expectations is key to a peaceful mind. -Know your capacity -Divide your priorities -Plan your work ahead of time -Allocate some buffer ~15% -Proactive communication is crucial

Drawing from personal experience, I've found that clarity is a must from the get-go. This involves outlining project scopes, deliverables, and timelines in a transparent manner, ensuring alignment with both myself and clients. Being upfront about my availability and workload has been instrumental in preventing burnout and maintaining quality output. Overcommitting or underestimating tasks only leads to unnecessary stress and potential setbacks. By setting achievable expectations, I've been able to navigate projects smoothly, delivering results on time without compromising on quality.

Be clear. Clients value expectations over speed. They want to trust you're delivering the best quality in the best timeline possible. So don't rush. Estimate what it's gonna take to create high-quality output, and inform your clients. + make it trackable and predictible so they see the project(s) moving forward. That's been my experience.

For every project or operation, it's wise to set clear final goals, ideally leading them to measurable metrics like cost savings or time efficiency. This approach ensures you and your customer are on the same page, avoiding misunderstandings since what's considered a success by one might be viewed differently by another.

Pre agreed timelines, deliverables, measures, teams and timelines will assist to set clear expectations. Use SMART in objectives to make deliverables practical and achievable. Document these using a project charter and proper sign off. Plan projects based on time required in each phase to avoid over scheduling, proper workload management.

Project plans, critical path evaluation, estimate and anticipate impact to critical path to take corrective actions. Assign resposibilities and accountabilities using RACI matrix so that all involved stakeholders know their role and expectations of the each tasks. Map task assigned based on importance and urgency where important and urgent activities should be attended immediately for closure. See the possibility of delegating not important tasks with your team members for quality use of time. These approaches have supported me in managing tasks and complete on time in the past.

Process automation projects can suffer from scope expansion quickly. As much as possible, modularize the problem so that you can make progress on one issue at a time.

Delving deeper into the consulting field reveals different methods for delivering results. While it's quicker to pinpoint an issue, highlight it, and propose a solution, I believe in empowering the customer to discover the solution on their own. This approach involves delegating tasks such as testing and data collection, which aids in understanding the process's logic. As a result, the solution is reached with a deeper understanding and expertise.

The best way of managing your time as a consultant is to create a task/activity planning tracker with start time and end time that will help you track and measure time spent on each activities. This data will be helpful in calculating your efficiency and productivity time for each task or activity. List down your high time activities and try to figure out where you can save your time. You may also use applications like #clockify or #desktime and many other time management software ??

Técnicas como 'pomodoro', possibilitam a cria??o de um 'Flow' de trabalho, hoje existem diversas plataformas auxiliares para elevar o nível de foco e produtividade em diversas tarefas. Procurar engajamento do time durante o período de produ??o de entregáveis é t?o essencial quanto possibilitar o 'ócio criativo'. Possibilitar essas pausas ao seu time, evidenciará qualidades individuais complementares que podem contribuir com o desenvolvimento de logicas e pensamento critico.

Planning sprints, having a vision of capacity and short- and long-term objectives are fundamental, in addition, it is important to adapt to scenarios and know how to prioritize essential tasks, always with effective and transparent communication.

Time is a pricey commodity. Project planning, execution and handover plus resources allocation all are scheduled before any project starts using various tools and programs. However emphasis should be how it materializes in a real time situation. There are delays and problems. Main thing is how it is circumvented to meet the actual schedule.