5 Simple Steps

Step One - Enter and prioritize your tasks

Sit down with your team, and using the "Priority" task view, just start entering your tasks. Ask the question "List everything we need to do to accomplish our goal of <whatever>." PowerCard provides a convienent hot-key to enable this to be done quickly without moving your hands from the keyboard. Press Command-T, then quickly type in the title of the task and press enter. Don't worry about estimates right now, just slap the tasks in there. Don't think about them, just list them. Drag more important tasks to the top of the list. This is how you set overall priority. These will be done sooner in the project.

Step Two - Link related tasks

For each of the tasks entered in Step One, ask "Are there any other tasks already entered that require this task? Or does this task require any other task be done before it can be started?" If there are, hold down your Control key, and click and drag the card that requires another card, and drop it onto the card it requires. Remember when you are linking to think "This card <click> will require this other card <click>." PowerCard will handle scheduling the tasks such that any tasks required by a given task will be done before the requiring task needs it.

Step Three - Assign Resources

Go to the "Pert Chart". PowerCard will use your links as you made them in Step Two to arrange the cards in the following manner: Tasks that require other tasks will come after all the cards they require horizontally; Tasks that can be performed in parallel will be stacked below each other vertically. Using this chart you can see several things. The first is your "critical path", which is the list of tasks that is the longest from left to right (as connected by arrows.) Secondly, the places where you can gain the most efficiency by assigning parallel resources will be the longest from top to bottom. So in other words, ideally, you should try to assign different people to each of the tasks in a vertical stack. Double click each task card to assign a resource to it.

Step Four - Enter your Estimates

Now go to the tasks tab, and go to "Task List". Click the top of the "Assigned" column to sort by your assignments. Then ask each person in turn to estimate the "Estimated Time" which is the time they estimate it will take to do the task. For now, put this value in both "Estimated Time" and "Remaining Time" since you are just starting your project. If you were doing estimate updates, or if you are doing this for an existing project. Put the "Estimated Time" as the time they originally estimate the first time they are asked, then Remaining Time is a running current estimate of the task, and Actual Time is the time they have already spent on the task. When the task is complete, Remaining Time should be 0, Actual Time should be how much time they took to do it, and Estimated Time should still be their original estimate.

Step Five - Work Your Schedule

If you click on the Gantt chart tab, there's your schedule laid out for you. Now, each week of your project, return to each of your team members and update the status of their tasks. PowerCard will track your schedule progress as you go and show you how your're doing. The BurnDown chart will show you how much is left in the project and how accurate your estimates have been.

Thats all there is to it!