Project Timeline: Steps, Examples & Tools

A complete introduction to the concept of timelines and how to use them in project management.

Overview

Effective project management revolves around a clear timeline that acts as a reference hub for all the parts related to project deliverables and due dates. Without such a central control plan to optimize processes and track work, bottlenecks may occur, productivity decreases, and expectations get derailed.

On this page, we aim to cover the essential aspects that you need to know about managing your project timelines, including definitions, examples, and tools to create such important visuals.

What Is a Project Timeline?

Generally speaking, a timeline is a display of events arranged in chronological order over a certain time frame. It typically includes a long bar with events and their associated dates paralleling it. The bar, also called a timeband, usually relies on a linear scale in which a unit of distance is equivalent to a set amount of time. Based on the subject and data of the timeline, its timescale may span over years, months, or days.

Utility and Importance of Timelines in Project Management

Visualizing the evolution of certain events and activities over time, timelines can be used in various domains such as education, science, business and project management.

In the case of project management, timelines are used to visually represent the planned course of a project from start to finish, and they have become a centerpiece of successful project delivery. Divided into stages, tasks and subtasks that need to be completed between these two reference points, a project timeline helps everyone involved know what milestones need to be achieved and under what time schedule.

In other words, using a timeline in a project management process allows you to see the following main details about the project:

• What tasks are being carried out right now;
• What tasks have been already completed;
• What tasks are going to be done next.

Project managers who want to optimally oversee the underlying processes always begin with a clear project timeline. To this end, many resort to various office tools like Microsoft Excel to produce such graphics. However, these can prove difficult to use or limited when it comes to creating more customized visuals, updating them in real time or easily sharing them with key team members. To enable professionals to make the most out of a project timeline, an increasingly diverse range of specialized project timeline software has been developed.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Project Timeline?

Project timelines have come to occupy a central place in project management as they significantly contribute to achieving these crucial goals:

• Keeping all participants (both inside and outside the organization) updated at every stage of the project;
• Holding team members accountable for their assigned work;
• Effectively communicating project details, due dates, approvals, supplementary assets;
• Providing more accurate estimations for project deliverables;
• Improving resource management.

How to Create a Timeline for a Project

Here are the steps to follow in order to start planning a project and create its associated timeline:

1. Create the overall breakdown structure of your project by listing its main goals, deliverables and associated tasks. This helps you define the scope of your project and clearly outline what work needs to be done to deliver it.
2. Break the overall deliverables down into smaller, more manageable sub-units and milestones, and sequence them in a logical order. If the project is more complex, you can also group these to highlight its different phases.
3. Estimate the time required for completing each project task and assign due dates based on their duration.
4. Identify any dependencies between tasks and delineate the critical path of your project. By listing the core tasks that are crucial to seeing the project through and indicating how these are interconnected, everyone will know how one activity can affect another. Understanding the impact that a delay of a task can have over the whole project allows better prioritization and reconfiguration, if necessary.

Once these are determined, you can start building the actual project timeline using timeline templates, you could make a timeline with your usual office tools, or you may opt for a dedicated timeline generator.

To find out more about how to create a timeline for a project, both manually and automatically, check out our detailed tutorials that cover the most popular office software for Windows and Mac OS:

• How to make a timeline in Microsoft PowerPoint
• How to make a timeline in Microsoft Excel
• How to make a timeline in Microsoft Word
• How to make a timeline in Microsoft Project
• How to make a timeline in Google Docs and Google Sheets
• How to make a timeline in Numbers for Mac
• How to make a timeline in Keynote for Mac
• How to make a timeline in Pages for Mac

In each of these tutorials, you’ll find step-by-step instructions and screenshots to help you create timelines. You can try the manual version that takes at least 30 minutes of your time, but you can also learn how to use an automated timeline tool to cut down the time you spend creating and updating your timeline to just a few minutes.

Timeline maker for PowerPoint

Create a stunning project timeline directly in PowerPoint with just a few clicks.