Personal Project Workflow

Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of the Microsoft Project Made Easy series. For more project management advice, visit the website TacticalProjectManagement.com.

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Project management processes are typically comprised of multiple activities. If you’ve developed any training material for your projects, then you’ve familiar with process flow charts and supporting tasks. In IT projects, there is usually an operational process or workflow that the end users follows to put the IT solution into action. Even though workflow is associated with recurring operational tasks, they can be applied to professional and personal projects.

In addition to my day job as an IT manager, my personal project is maintaining a blog on project management and publishing a few articles on gantthead from time to time. Blog management and the writing process has its own unique workflow that needs content creation, content approval, promotion and invoicing (for freelance assignments). Tracking and managing all of this work is a project in itself. Fortunately, there are free project management tools that can be used to to manage personal workflow.

In this example, I’ve use Trello to manage the blog content management process (you can read a detailed review of Trello in my Projects@Work ToolShop review article). Using Trello, I manage my own personal project workflow as follows:

Step 1: Create lists for each stage in the workflow
In Trello, each major stage in a workflow is treated as a list. For the writing process, I’ve defined …

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