Systematic reviews are long-haul projects. They require a considerable investment in time and effort and they generally cannot be done by a single person, instead requiring a team of people to be involved. Some of those people will be involved all the way through the timeline and some of them will be involved for particular parts.
This means you will need to ensure that you have time and that the other people involved will also be able to commit their time and effort to the review. So you will need to map out a timeline indicating when certain tasks in the review process should take place so that everyone involved has a general idea of when they may be called upon.
Where relevant you will also need to make sure that the members of your team have access to the same software (or compatible software) when you have shared documents or tasks to prevent files from becoming corrupted.
You should also ensure you make regular backups so that if the worst happens you haven't lost all of the work you, and others in your team, have done.
When it comes to determining how long a systematic review will take it's difficult to be precise but you should plan for at least a year, while being aware that for certain topics it can take a little longer.
Some tasks you'll be able to do concurrently so while they might each take 3 months to complete, because they happen at the same time it's still 3 months, not 6. Be realistic about how long it will take to do, especially if you have other commitments (work, other projects etc.) that will affect how much time you can spend a day/ week on the review.
You can plan out your timeline in a table, a shared calendar for everyone in the team to access, a spreadsheet and so on. Whatever works for you and your colleagues, that everyone can view when they need to (perhaps with sections where people can post progress updates). Utilise the SMART goals structure (Boogaard, 2021) so that everything is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This means that everything recorded in the plan should be assigned to a person (or group of people), and each task should have a realistic date by which you expect--or it needs--to be completed. The person who is leading on the project will be responsible for monitoring those tasks and checking on progress before the scheduled completion date, this way you'll have advance warning of any problems with the project and can either adjust the timeline or recruit additional people to help as required.
Once you've planned your timeline you will then need to move on to planning the search strategy. (See the next tab above)
Boogaard, K. (2021) How to write SMART goals: It's easier to succeed when you have clearly defined objectives that are based in reality. Available from: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/how-to-write-smart-goals (Accessed: 14 December 2022)