Stuart R. Gallant, MD, PhD

I was talking with one of my nieces recently.  In her school, she and several of her friends have a project to build a small greenhouse to grow mushrooms.  I am writing this post in the hopes it will be helpful to her, not just for her current science project, but in life in general.

In work and in life, most of what we do are “small projects,” like doing the laundry.  You can sort your clothes into whites and colors as you collect the dirty laundry in your bedroom—ending up with two bags—one dirty whites and the other dirty colors.  Or, you can put all the dirty clothes in one bag and sort them as you load the washing machine.  The sorting doesn’t make a lot of difference in the effort and time involved.  The most important aspect is just to get moving—start doing the laundry or start cleaning the house—whatever the task is.  In small projects, working smart is not critical to success—it is more about hard work.

There is a whole other category:  “large projects”—building a house, taking a vacation to Paris, or designing and building a mushroom greenhouse.  These types of tasks involve:  1) team learning—what is the best type of foundation for your house?  2) expenditure of resources—plane tickets to Paris are expensive, 3) and multistep coordination and timing—you need to select what species of mushroom to grow before you will know what soil, moisture, light, and temperature is required in your greenhouse.

Today’s post is about the process of developing a timeline and a budget for a large project.

Your Team

Teams contain diverse members with different personal styles.  Some people are highly communicative, others are quiet.  Some people want to have their own way, others are content to go with what the group decides.

Each person has their own expertise.  Maybe the quiet person sitting listening comes from a family of mushroom farmers, while the person doing all the talking is the child of two computer programmers.  Both people may have something to contribute—one may have wisdom about the right mushroom species to select, while the other may be able to help setup the control system for humidity in a greenhouse.  But, getting the best contribution from each member may not be easy.

A Timeline is Just a Plan

Everyone is fairly comfortable with the word “plan”—a step by step list of what you need to do to achieve a goal.  Another word for “plan” is “timeline.”  The elements of a timeline include:

• List of All the Steps:  You don’t want to forget to buy the soil to build the greenhouse, so you put that on the list—along with every other necessary step.
• Sufficient Detail:  At the highest level, you have broad categories:  buy supplies, assemble greenhouse, plant mushrooms, monitor growth, harvest.  But each high level step contains many smaller steps, so you have to keep breaking down items until they are simple enough that you can actually perform them.  Consider the task “buy soil.”  Let’s assume that you already decided what type of soil.  You will need to locate places that that soil can be purchased, consider which is cheapest and which has the quality you need, allocate the money for the purchase, and arrange for a member of your team to go the store and make the purchase.  For each task, ask yourself the question, “Could I do this without further information or resources?”  If the answer is no, then break down that task further.
• Cost:  Nothing in life is free.  How does each item coast?  Does that fit within your overall budget?
• Timing:  What needs to be done first, second, last?  Can some tasks be completed in parallel?  Do some tasks require completion of other tasks?—you cannot purchase the components of your greenhouse until you know what the design is.

Making a Plan

There are many ways to develop a plan.  You could write down the plan and give it to your team members—but that would likely not be the best plan.  What you want to do is pull out the knowledge, effort, wisdom, and talent of each member of your team to make the best plan possible.

Here is one way to develop a plan that is both intuitive and tends to get the best of your whole team—an additional benefit is that if you use this process, it tends to get your entire team invested in project psychologically.  The steps are:

1. Team Meeting for Plan:  Find a time that works for your entire team—an hour is probably sufficient for some projects, but others may require two hours—after that people get bored and tired.  You may need more than one meeting.  If so, someone on your team should take notes, so that you remember what was said.
2. Supplies:  You will need books of Post-It Notes—at least one for each team member, and pens for everyone.
3. A Surface:  You can use a white board or a table.  If you use a table, push all the chairs to the side, away from the table.  You want everyone to circulate freely around the surface—not be bound to their chair.

The process is that you ask everyone to write items for the plan—”select mushroom species”, “buy spores”, “design greenhouse”.  Some items may be quite large—“design greenhouse” is a huge task involving layout, utilities, control systems, materials selection…  Others may be small—“spread soil on the greenhouse bed.”  To create the timeline, ask everyone to:

1. Write Tasks on Post-Its:  They should include the name of the task in large clear letters, and perhaps small details below the name.  Details like “requires some research,” “this could be costly,” or “Mr. X knows all about this” are helpful to capture.
2. Place the Post-Its:  Arrange the Post-Its left to right with the earlier ones to the left and the later ones to the right.
3. Move the Items:  Once a task is placed on the surface, everyone can think about whether it is correctly placed.  Maybe, “select mushroom species” ends up towards the right, but then you realize that the greenhouse design depends on the mushroom species, so species selection is moved to left and the other tasks all slide a little to the right.
4. Expand Items:  It is perfectly fine to write out a high level task—“design greenhouse”—and lay it on the surface.  As the team circulates in front of the plan, someone will realize that there are many subtasks and start writing the subtask on Post-Its.  You may start with 10 or 12 Post-Its, but over the course of your planning session, the number could increase to 50 or even 200.

What is going on is a kind of parallel thinking where the entire team is putting their best ideas forward.

Document Your Plan

Unfortunately, a board full of Post-Its is not the best communication tool.  You want to be able to share your timeline and update it as your plan evolves.

For decades, Microsoft Project has been the gold standard for timeline representation, but many other apps can be used.  Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are two tools that you probably already have access to on your laptop.  Let’s assume you are going to use Word.  Here is what you do to create your project document:

1. Take Photo(s):  You have invested time in creating your Post-It plan.  Before a janitor throws the whole thing away, take photos to document what it looked like.  You now have a permanent record of your timeline building session.
2. Make an Indented Bullet List:  Using a bullet list allows you to easily insert tasks you forgot or delete task that are not important.  Transform you left to right Post-It plan into a top to bottom Word bullet list.  Initially, transfer the written information from the Post-Its, but you can add more detail in the days and weeks that follow.
3. Include Information About Time and Cost:  With the Post-It list, you can visually include a gap to account for time.  “Purchase Greenhouse Supplies” may have a gap after it for the supplies to arrive.  In your Word document, note timing and cost with each item—“about 3 weeks” and “about $100”—whatever you know.  This information can be updated later.
4. Circulate Your Plan:  There is a lot to project management, too much for this post, but the first step after you have a plan is to send it to your team and others (for example, your advisor) for the plan to be checked.  You can get helpful feedback during this circulation that makes you revise your plan.

Conclusions—the What Versus the How

This post is similar to an earlier post on PharmaTopo “The Design Process” [1].  In fact, today’s post is so similar, it is worth discussing how to use the two posts.

The design process is about the “what”—malaria is a problem in my country, what do I do about it?  You could purchase and distribute mosquito nets, provide mosquito repellant, remove standing water around dwellings, design a vaccine…  Each of these solutions has costs and benefits.  The design of a solution to malaria is really about picking the best solution that protects people from the disease malaria.

Today’s post on timelines is about the “how”—you already know what the solution is (a greenhouse), what are the steps to build the greenhouse, how long will it take, what will the cost be?  If you want to distribute mosquito nets, which kind are the best in terms of cost and performance, where can they be purchased, what outlets will you use for distribution, when will you begin your project, how soon do you expect results…

But, the “what” and the “how” are not really separable.  Maybe, you want to develop a malaria vaccine, but once you make a vaccine plan, you find that the time will be too long—you want a quicker solution to prevent malaria.  So, it is critical to keep the design process and the planning process separate in your head.  If it starts to look like your team has doubts about the design, you can say something like, “Wait a minute, we are trying to plan our project, but I’m not sure we are clear on what we are trying to build.  Why don’t we return to the design process and be sure that we agree on our solution before we try to plan the implementation?”

[1]  Gallant, Stuart. R.  “The Design Process,” PharamaTopo, June 22 (2022).

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