Workback Schedule and it's importance for designers

A "workback schedule" is a method of planning where you start with your final deadline and work backwards, breaking the task down into smaller, more manageable chunks and assigning deadlines for each. This approach can help ensure that you stay on track and meet your overall deadline.

Then obviously there is 'Working Backward from Customers'. Having work at Amazon, I cannot emphasize enough its importance in designing and/or developing any product. I will touch base on this and some of its key element in my next blog post 'Working Backwards from Customer'. For now lets deep dive on importance of workback schedule and steps you could take to help create a workback for your next project.

Importance of workback in the design process

It helps Designers stay organized, prioritize tasks and manage their time effectively. By starting with the final deadline and working backwards, one can ensure that all necessary steps are thought about ahead of time and ensures everything gets completed on time. A few highlights and wins that worked for me using the workbacks:

1. Alignment across teams; provides visibility into end-to-end design process to partner teams, stakeholders and clients. Helps prevent last-minute rush jobs or unwanted expectations and reduce the risk of mistakes or oversights.

2. Bring out dependencies; allows teams to discuss dependencies like tech, product, schedule (time) constraints ahead of time. Avoids 11th hour surprises.

3. Scope clarity; helps designers to better understand the scope of the project, identify potential roadblocks, and make adjustments as needed. Detailing out each milestone and time one would need per milestone ahead of time, forces you to pause and think through it, hence providing clarity.

Overall, a work backward schedule can help to increase productivity and deliver better quality work.

Things to consider while creating a Workback Schedule:

1. Drop dead dates: Work out the hard deadline or delivery date with your engineering partner. You can always plan for batch deliverables (phases) that helps keep them unblocked.

2. Break it down: Break down and detail out each milestone you would like to execute for the project. For example, 'User Research' is not just one milestone, its a combination of smaller milestones, like '1. Prepare Protocol and screener', '2. Review and Iterate', '3.Recruit Participants', '4.Conduct Study', '5.Analyze Data and Insights', '6. Prepare Report', '7. Peer review', '8. Stakeholder review', '9. Iterate', '10. Finalize report'

3. Plan for dependencies/unknown: Estimate how long each milestone will take. Always account for dependencies, such as stakeholder availability for reviews and inputs needed from other functions like Product, to help complete your task.

4. Don't slog: While estimating don't account for 100% of your bandwidth (even if this is your ONLY project). Account for meetings, tracking and reporting time, stakeholder connects and breaks.

5. Review and Iterate: Work with your stakeholders to review and iron-out details. Devil lies in the detail, its critical to take time ahead of executing the project to work out finer details. Treat it like design, needs iteration for refinement.

Important thing to note here is that this not a fixed formula that guarantees a smooth project execution, you will still have your share of learning. Workback helps mitigate risks and helps you organize your thoughts and steps ahead of time.

To further deep dive, I would recommending a few more articles that I thought were good:

• Creating a Workback Schedule - A Quick Guide

• What Is a Workback Schedule? (With Templates and Examples)

• How To Create a Robust Workback Schedule