Your school offers a Gardening after school activity. You have four plots.
In order to track what vegetables are to be grown when, you would like a simple visualization tool to produce a chart to blow up and put on the classroom wall.
In reality, vegetables don’t grow for just a few days as indicated above, but this is the sort of chart you want, right? It’s a just a pretty timeline.
Now, imagine a more complex project at your school, for example reviewing policies. Just like the gardening chart above, there will be tasks that have a definitive start and end date. Some tasks, however, will be interrelated; for example the task to re-write an Academic Integrity Policy might depend on a revision of another key policy like the Mission Statement.
We might wish this could be visualized with a simple timeline chart, but in reality what is needed is a way to navigate something much more complex. So you can’t really use a timeline. You could use a Gantt chart instead!
Are you horrified at the idea of using such a chart in a school to track a project’s progress? Yeah, me too. Let’s use something simpler.
“Done, Now, Next, Later”
Instead of tracking progress objectively with dates, projects can be tracked in relative terms. When the school mission has been finalized, it can be put into the “Done” pile. Then, the next project that was waiting for it, becomes put into the “Now” pile.
Then after completed with the Academic Integrity, we’ll start on Code of Conduct, and then sometime after that, Attendance Policies. The tasks would shift around in the columns as they progress.
Where I think this is useful in terms of change management, isn’t in understanding the timeline though, but in understanding to what extent changes can be made. From the above, since “Attendance Policies” is in the Later column, other staff members will know immediately that if they have some ideas for consideration, then it’s a good time to make a note to yourself and give the suggestion when it’s in the Next column. Meanwhile, it’s the perfect time to given suggestions for the Code of Conduct, but it’s too late to be giving suggestions for the Academic Integrity policy, as group has already started on the work.
If something needs to be changed for the Mission Statement, it’ll have to be rescheduled to the next time that topic is tackled.
Instead of tracking progress, it’s really just tracking change itself.