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Define Project Resource

When you come in to work and find that you’re assigned to 14 new projects, it’s time for an employee availability chart.

Define Project Resource: a person or shared object committed to a project, such that it cannot be used on another project at the same time.

And… what’s an employee availability chart?

It’s a chart that shows bars for each week, telling how many hours an employee has available to them. On an empty week, you’d see a 40-hour bar. On a booked week, you’d see no bar. Or, on a partially booked week you might see a short bar.

Bars on the employee availability chart are based on project and task assignments. You may be assigned 25% of your daily hours on a certain project, and 75% on another. These would total up to 100% of your daily hours. Or, you might be assigned to certain tasks that fill up your day.

Before assigning resources to projects, it might be good to check their availability; they might be assigned to other projects that you didn’t know about.

To be fair, project resources can be more than just people. They can be equipment that is assigned to a project so that nobody else can use them at the same time. Any shared item or person can be a resource.

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Define PTO Accrual

This little video will help explain paid time off or PTO. Scroll down for a look. If you’re tracking vacation or PTO in a spreadsheet, you probably already know there are hundreds of computations that can go wrong. Using paper and pencil is almost impossible.

HR managers appreciate the flexibility of PTO rules from the Standard Time® app. To begin, employees have their banks for hours. There is a bank for vacation. A bank for personal time. And banks for every other kind of time off, like sick, training, maternity leave, and jury duty.

Now that you have your banks of hours set up to represent the exact number of hours available to each employee, and for each kind of time off you should set up some rules for accrual. Every employee accrues (earns) hours periodically. The longer they work, the more they earn. And then they use those hours on their own time schedule.

Set up PTO accruals earnings weekly, monthly, semimonthly, or yearly. As time ticks by, the hours add up. But what if too many add up? You have an anti-hording device to cut off too many hours. That enforces your company “use it or lose it” policy.

Watch the little video cruise over to the ST website for a look at the real thing.

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Start a timer with RFID Tag Reader

Learn how to start a timer with an RFID tag reader. (scroll down for the video) You can buy a starter kit for about $30 that contains an RFID reader and some cards and tags. That’s all you need to track time with RFID. Check amazon.

Already got RFID readers installed?

Now that everything is in place, you can start and stop a timer in Standard Time® using with just a simple RFID scan. Wave a proximity card in front of the RFID scanner and a timer starts. Wave it again, and the timer stops. Now you’ve got some serious time tracking data to work with.

Every RFID scan in Standard Time includes the following information. Of course the end user doesn’t realize or care that all this is automatically collected. They just wave their card and go on. But you can use this intel to improve manufacturing, assembly lines, or just for employee time and attendance.

What is collected in every RFID tag scan:

  1. Employee name, and the workgroup they are in
  2. Timestamps for start and stop times, including the actual hours between those timestamps
  3. Project the employee is working on
  4. Task the employee is working on
  5. Client the project is assigned to
  6. Billing rates assigned to the employee
  7. Client cost for the full duration between scans
  8. Salary cost for the full duration

Seriously? All that is collected in one scan? Yup. Pretty powerful.

What you can report on with RFID scans:

  1. Total employee hours for a given date range, like last week or last month
  2. Total project hours for all the projects in your organization
  3. Total client hours
  4. Salary and client billable amounts
  5. Client invoices

Watch the video and try it out.

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Define Project Management Triangle

Did you know there are (at least) three competing demands on your project? And did you know that you can’t have all three? You can only pick two. (video below) Here they are:

Define Project Management Triangle: A triangular graph illustrating the three project constraints of time, cost, and scope.

So those are the three constraints that pull your project all out of shape. Time, cost, and scope. And the crazy thing is, as a project manager or project stakeholder you can only pick two. You have to let the other go where it goes. Are you ready for that.

Scenario #1: Let’s say you want your project right now, and really cheap. Guess what? You’ll get something really junky. In other words, the scope will be small and probably less than what you’re expecting.  You chose time and cost. You got scope handed to you.

Scenario #2: You want your project right now, and you want everything under the sun. Okay, now you’ll find that your project costs you a fortune. You chose time and scope. Cost now depends on those two, and it’s going to cost you big-time.

Scenario #3: You want this thing done cheap and you want a lot. Well, that is going to take some time. Because it’s cheap, you’ll just have to wait for some things. You chose cost and scope, and so time is the one thing you’ll have to live with.

See how these things all inter-depend? Did you know you can see a graph of your own results? Watch the video and try it out.

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Define Timesheet

Do all your employees hate filling out project timesheets? If so, you may have the wrong timesheet. The “hassle factor” may be just too high for comfort. Go down farther on the page for a delightful little video by Zach the project geek. He wants to hear from you.  🙂

Define timesheet: An entry form for period accounting of employee and project hours. Standard Time® is an example of employee timesheets.

Normally, timesheets are weekly. They normally list projects that employees are assigned to. Sometimes those projects can be expanded to show tasks. Often task hours roll up to the project level so employees can see how many hours they spent on each project for each day.

Sometimes timesheets show only the seven days of the week, and sometimes they show all the days of a pay period. Totals are often shown at the bottom of each daily column, and weekly totals are shown below those. Pay period hours may also be displayed, where the expected number of hours are compared with actuals.

Graphical timesheet, as shown in Standard Time, may display time segments in a graphical form, as you might see in a Microsoft Outlook calendar. Drag blocks around to change time or actual work.

Behind the scenes, project timesheets often collect billable amounts based on actual work. Billing rates usually depend on the person performing the work. Invoices collect all those time segments, with their billing rates into one bill. Clients can see details and rates associated with every task and person on the job.

Good timesheets make life simple for both companies and employees. Let’s see what Zach has to say in the video below.

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Define Project Milestone

Dreading your next project milestone? It’s a date you hope nobody remembers so it can slip silently into the night. Watch Kat in the video below.

Define Project Milestone: A date marking a significant event in the lifestyle of a project. Standard Time® has billable milestones.

Project milestones mark dates where you evaluate the state of your project. They could be customer related, like a date you can invoice the client for work performed. Or, they could be go/no go events where you evaluate the status of your work and decide if you can move forward to the next phase. Project milestones could trigger staff meetings to bring everyone onto the same page, and make sure everyone is ready to proceed with the project. Is there anything outstanding? Any reason not to begin the next phase? Finally, project milestones can relate to release dates. You have completed a phase of the project and are ready for public delivery and release.

As stated above, ST has project milestones. You can get email notifications for upcoming milestones, and view a short list of them. Project milestones can be used for client invoicing. Just choose the billing type: date range, percentage of project cost, or fixed amount. The actual invoice amount is based on the project milestone settings.

Watch the video and give project milestones a try.

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Define Project Tracker

Is your project wrecking your company and leaving you destitute? The problem may be your project tracker. Watch the video below for a definition.

Define: Project Tracker. A system for monitoring long-term and cohesive activities, usually in software.  Standard Time® is such a project tracker.

It’s true; projects can go crazy without a project tracker. Employees camp out on favorite tasks, and convince managers that more time is needed. Tasks go over budget, and nobody notices slowdown trends that triple the project duration. Feature creep balloons up the scope until you wake up one morning and realize you’re chasing a moving target… or the moving target is chasing you. You have to get things under control, but you don’t know how.

Those are some of the things a good project tracker can do. You can set “do not exceed” percentages for tasks. That holds tasks to a reasonable duration. It prevents the slow lag from developing. You can monitor new tasks added to the project to prevent feature creep. You can view the health of your project with Project Triangle charts. You can check resource levels to make sure nobody is over or under allocated.

Are you running a project tracker? Why not try Standard Time?

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Start Timer with Mag Card Readers

Manufacturers: Use a mag card reader to start and stop a timer. Consider swiping cards to start and stop a timer for manufacturing purposes. Swipe once to start the timer, and swipe again to stop. The video below describes how.

This technique allows you to associate any employee badge or card to a Standard Time® username. Swipe once to start a timer for the associated user. A selected project and task will start. The timer will run until you swipe again.

Manufacturing and assembly shops can collect information like total product build times, total employee hours, packaging time, and shipping. Find out how much time you spend on each kind of work, and improve each one by a small percentage.

Download Standard Time here, and give this a try with your own magnetic card reader.

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Track Time with Multiple Barcode Scanners on a Single PC

Manufacturing shops can now set up multiple barcode scanners on a single computer to track assembly time, boxing, and shipping. Watch the video below to learn how.

Here’s the deal… you don’t want to dedicate a single computer to every barcode scanner. In other words, one computer for one scanner. You have too many shop floor operators to do that. It’s a waste of resources, and every PC needs care and maintenance. You want to connect as many barcode scanners as you can to each PC on the shop floor. As long as workers can see the screen, you’re good to go.

Turns out, barcode prefixes are the answer. Assign a unique prefix to each barcode scanner on the manufacturing floor. Then you can connect as many as you like. Standard Time® will recognize the prefix and start timers for each scanner.

Not only can you connect multiple scanners, you can set default values that take effect every time you scan. Want to associate a dedicated gun to one single employee only? Easy, just set the default username. Now the employee no longer needs to scan their username to start the timer.

Other default values let you associate a gun to a certain project or task. Every time you scan with that gun, your project and task is already chosen for you. No need to scan them. The timer will start immediately, without the need to tell it which project you’re on.

All these little improvements to barcode scanning make your manufacturing process just a little more efficient. Give it a try!

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Define Consultant, Freelancer, Contractor

What is a consultant? Zach knows. (scroll down for video)

Zach is a consultant, and the head of consultants. So he knows what a consultant is. Zach says, consultants used to be people you brought in for one or two days, maybe a week tops, that would explain a certain issue to you. Once explained, the consultant would leave. You consulted with consultants, and that was it. They were experts, and they explained things. You asked them specific questions, which they knew the answers to. Once you got the answer, you went off and did what they said.

That was before the internet and YouTube.

Now consultants are much like full-time employees. They often sit in the same offices and attend the same meetings. If you don’t ask, you may never know that your coworker is a 1099 freelancer. They still have expertise in a certain area, and apply that expertise like regular employees.

The big advantage to employers is their temporary stay. A months is usually enough. No pesky benefits package, no nurturing, no investment. Just raw performance for a price you can live with.

The thing is, consultants have to learn how to make good money. If they don’t, those short-term contracts turn into vicious cycles of feast and famine. You have to know how to up-sell and extend your stay. Plus, charge enough to tide you over during the down times. Without that, you’ll be out of business in no time.

Plus, consultants have to become very familiar with things like effective billing rates, utilization percentages, and billable hours. Working for a consulting firm removes you from that tedious treachery. You just work like an employee, and everything is okay. But the freelancer definitely has to watch his numbers, or he’ll end of working for two dollars an hour.

Download Standard Time® and let us know if it can help your consulting biz.  🙂