Your project communications must have impact

Clear communications are fundamental for success

The lifeblood of successful projects, according to experts, is clear communication. But, communicating project plans, current status, or results to team members, executives, clients and other stakeholders can be a roadblock for many project managers. A clear Gantt-style timeline can display project status and future plans in a visually impactful way. It can display the long-term overview or a close-up of potential points of concern. Communicating these points clearly is vital to the relationships with all stakeholders. It can help to set expectations and enable agreements.

What does your project’s timeline look like?

A clear, professional Gantt-style chart displaying the important points of the project can be created easily and quickly using the Office Timeline Plus timeline maker in PowerPoint. The Office Timeline Plus add-in is an easy-to-use tool which can import the critical data needed from sources including Microsoft Project, Excel, Smartsheet and Wrike. The intuitive layout helps you create an impressive visual that will be interesting and immediately understandable.

Expert advice tells us that extra attention needs to be taken to ensure that the relevance of the visuals used matches that of the audience. Think of their needs and fight the urge to include anything else but the most critical and valuable data. Scrutinize each element to avoid the possibility of overwhelming your audience. As in all presentations, you are addressing the stakeholder in the last row, as well as the one in front. Is your visual having the same effect to them? Office Timeline Plus provides the ability to enhance or hide any timeline element for its greatest impact on everyone alike.

Customizing your visual

Office Timeline has powerful features for customizing the style of your visual so that it delivers the message you want with an elegant, quickly understood timeline.

Use color and scale: Displaying the information with distinct colors or shapes for emphasis can be impactful in its brevity. The size and color of a taskbar or milestone can indicate the importance, the requirements, or the function of a specific task, component, or group. This simple method of communicating vital information can be created in minutes with stunning, easily digestible, and professional results using Office Timeline Plus.

Use differing timescales: Long-running projects are important to be displayed in their entirety but also need to be shown in close-up to address immediate issues and concerns.

Avoid all that data: You have plenty of it but leave the details off the presentation. Less is truly more for a presentation with impact. Your audience can easily understand the relationships and time commitments allocated to tasks and their respective milestones, even without dates or long, descriptive titles. Keep the use of these to a minimum.

Use templates for professional results

Keeping it simple doesn’t apply only to the final slide, it means spending less time in creating the slide. Templates are invaluable in this respect. Office Timeline Plus provides several templates designed for different industries, interests, or style preference that will kickstart your timeline creation and are easy to customize for your specific audience. The templates will give you plenty of ideas on how to design this visual for maximum Impact.

Office Timeline Plus improves communication results

Using Office Timeline Plus will dramatically improve your communications with your entire project team and the project’s various stakeholders. Office Timeline Plus is a powerful add-in for PowerPoint which imports and converts data from multiple sources into elegant, professional timelines that will be remembered by colleagues, executives, clients, and other stakeholders in your projects.

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