My job (grant writer) already entails managing a lot of deadlines. I do it mostly through my Outlook Calendar and a mediocre grants management system.* It works to keep track of about fifty grants/reports per year. But now my job title is changing, my responsibilities are increasing and so, too, will the sheer number of things I will need to keep track of on an ongoing basis. I’ll be administering all federal grants and responsible for compliance, which means soliciting spend down reports and other data from employees on a regular basis and adding all sorts of new tasks to my workload.
I’m not sure the best way to manage all those tasks and deadlines. I don’t think Outlook is gonna cut it.
I have a long history of trying task management software that ultimately fails me in some way, but I’m open to suggestions. Those of you with experience in administrative work, how do you do it?
*I will soon switch to a better grants management system, but I’m not sure how much administrative work a grants management database will be able to do for me. I haven’t demoed anything yet and it could take months to implement, so I need a survival plan in the meantime.
Microsoft Project is what I have used for managing projects with multiple deadlines and numerous milestones. Its pretty much standard in my industry (automotive), but there are likely many other versions of the same thing, quite a few of them free.
The punchline for you is you need to know what is due when and a reasonable start time to get to the end by the deadline. Outlook tasks can totally do that if and only if you’re totally on board with the admin effort to keep the model in Outlook 100% synchronized with the reality out in the world of you and your co-conspirators.
But …
You (probably) need to track subtasks on the way to each major task completion. Outlook has no concept of subtasks. MS Project or open-source equivalents might work well but is probably overkill. IME it’s great for large monolithic projects, but not for dozens of identical small projects each following a common 10- or 50-substep template plus minor per-project customizations
The largest issue I see with any of these systems is unless all the contributors are tied into the same system and do 100% of their work & submissions through the system so it maintains teh model automatically, you as manager really have two jobs: A) supervise the work getting done, and B) maintain the project completion model in lockstep with the actual reality in the field. When you fall behind with job B, you’re hopeless lost. meanwhile, job A is the one you’re being judged on. Oops.
I personally have no experience in the grant business. But I do have extensive experience with maintaining models aligned with workflows taking place in other systems. That’s a fool’s errand destined to failure for all but the most under-tasked of anal-retentive obsessives. I bet you’re neither that anally retentive an obsessive, nor so under-tasked that you have 30 hours a week to devote to model maintenance separate from hassling your contributors, stakeholders, etc., to meet their deadline and quality metrics.
Excellent reply.
Not just to the specific OP, but to so many complex situations, systems.
I have worked in several organizations where multiple systems/schemes were used, with no equal relational framework.
I asked the person who currently does this job how she keeps track of it all. She said she just reads her email notifications from DHHS. Supposedly, when you receive a grant from them, every key staff member in their system has an assigned role, and emails are sent to people with certain roles at the appropriate times. But as Project Director, it’s my responsibility to know whether those tasks were completed and I’m not 100% sure what emails those other roles are receiving. I also do not receive a notification when they complete a task.
We are working on finding a better grants management database.
Our current one is very basic, but it has the limited functionality to assign tasks to other users… But I usually just send an email instead.
You might also try Trello (free). You set up a Kanban board with whatever categories you want (i.e. Not Started, In Progress, Done). It’s more for tracking activities than for due dates.
Something like Trello is a good suggestion. You can use different views of your tasks depending on your goal. The Kanban board is a great view of pending work, work in progress, blocked tasks, etc. A calendar view or task list by date works for keeping track of deadlines. The same data is used for everything, so you can switch views as desired.
This is an area I’m very interested in, and I’m going through something similar at work.
Lots of good suggestions in the thread already. The point I wanted to make is that it’s important to be clear about the distinction between tools and methodologies.
Trello, Project et al are tools. How well they work for you personally will depend on how they fit into your own workflow. A bitter lesson I’ve learned personally is that a new productivity tool won’t make me more organised, no matter how many new ones I try.
It might be worth looking at something like Getting Things Done or equivalent systems. GTD is a methodology that you can implement with whatever tools you have access to. Personally, I’ve tried GTD a couple of times and it’s never stuck, but that probably says more about me than it - lots of people swear by it.