How To Create a Project Overview For Your Team

Let’s talk about project overviews. 

To put it bluntly: they’re essential to help project managers organize, plan, and prepare. 

Without them, you might as well just dive into a project headfirst — with no idea why you’re doing it, how you’re going to hit your goals, and what you can expect to get out of all this hard, hard work.

Instead, you can take advantage of airfocus to build your own overviews and put even the most complex, eye-watering projects into action.

How? Don’t worry — we’ll show you everything you need to know to get started.

But before then, we’ll cover a few fundamentals. 

Starting with the big one:

What is a project overview? 

A project overview (aka a project summary) is a practical tool, designed to empower managers with the means to create detailed plans for a project. 

This is usually done before a team starts work on said project, and the overview serves as a valuable blueprint that key players can leverage to stay on track.

With a solid project overview in place, a team can kickstart a project with clear targets in mind and ensure their work aligns with these throughout.

And a good project overview makes checking progress quick and easy, as all the main information required to retain momentum is centralized in a widely-accessible location.

The best overviews also visualize the project plan, so team members can get quick insights into goals, progress, and more — something text-based plans just can’t compete with. 

Project overviews can be tweaked on the fly too, as motivations, objectives, or team structures change. This helps teams retain full visibility on updates and adjustments, to avoid miscommunication and confusion.

Effective overviews become indispensable for the duration of a project, providing team members with all the key details, resources, and focus they need to perform at their best.

What does a project overview look like?

The presentation of project overviews can vary, but the essentials remain the same. 

A project overview should be very visual, with information organized into clear sections, using color-coding to aid fast scannability. Team-members should be able to find the details they’re looking for in a matter of moments and get back to work.

You don’t want them to lose precious time scouring blocks of text until they can weed out the answers they need. 

A project overview has to be concise, too. There are no sense packing paragraphs of verbose copy onto the page just to show how smart you are, or an in effort to articulate complex ideas in minute detail.

Aim to condense even the most challenging concepts into a few lines, and let workers know where they can find more in-depth information if they need it.

Think short. Think quick. Think practical. Think time is of the essence.

The project overview can also be used to show team leaders the tasks involved in bringing a product or service to fruition, to prepare designers/developers/marketers for the work ahead, and to maintain a tight focus throughout the entire process. 

Is this all sounding a bit familiar? Perhaps a little like another great, visualization tool: the roadmap?

Think again! A project overview is not the same as a roadmap. 

The difference between a project overview and a roadmap

Project overviews are for internal use only, to visualize tasks and measure progress. Roadmaps, on the other hand, relate more to the strategy and deliverables of a project rather than the day-by-day practicalities the work demands. 

Roadmaps are designed for high-level management and stakeholders to understand a project, too. Stakeholders may not be interested in who does what. But they will be interested in when the project will be finished, how it stands to bring them a return on investment, and how it benefits the company overall. 

In basic terms: overviews are for the teams actually doing the work and the managers overseeing them. This is why project overviews should be kept clean and clear, with minimal unnecessary detail. 

Traditionally, digital project overviews are produced as documents or spreadsheets. But you can take advantage of airfocus’s Gantt timeline and kanban board features to create user-friendly timelines instead. 

These combine to make building a project overview simple for even the most fresh-faced of beginners and allow for simple organization of tasks, milestones, resources, etc. 

You'll find more insight into the reason why you should digitize and how to create a project overview with airfocus in our blog article.

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