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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 Time Management

What is time management? Easy question and Zach answers it! Your time needs to be managed so you know how much time is spent on each project, how to bill clients, how many hours spent on each task, etc.

Zach is the time tracking and project management geek who answers questions for you. Ask anything about timesheets, time management, or project management. You’ll get an answer.

In this case, time management is watching your project tasks and admin so your project doesn’t bonk. It’s paying attention and keeping your head in the game. It’s making sure your project doesn’t crash.

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What Can Project Portfolios Do For You?

First off, what is a project portfolio? The video below answers this effectively. A project portfolio is just a collection of projects. It’s a “black box” filled with projects that relate to each other some way. You decide how they relate, or why they are bundled. Then you can work on the entire bundle.

The idea is that you can perform certain operations on an entire portfolio of projects rather than the individual projects themselves. Or course you can work with individual projects also. But portfolios give you a “black box” of projects that you can tinker with.

What can you do with portfolios? The video explains, but consider these possibilities.

  1. See resource allocation for an entire portfolio
  2. See revenue for a portfolio
  3. Run reports for a selected portfolio
  4. See historical time for a portfolio

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What is Your Effective Billing Rate?

Do you know how to calculate your effective billing rate? It’s pretty easy. Just divide your revenue by working hours. If you brought in $10,000 and worked worked 80 hours, your effective billing rate is $125.  Nice!

Scroll down for a video.

But if you brought in that same $10,000 but worked 80 hours on the project and 40 hours on secondary stuff, your effective billing rate is only $83. It’s that “secondary stuff” that kills you. We’re talking admin, email, Facebook, Twitter, hanging out, and goofing off. Of course, everyone has to goof off a little. We’re not machines. But still, it’s nice to know what we’re actually bringing in for every scheduled work hour.

The video below talks about finding your effective billing rate for a given time period, or for a certain project. That’s harder to do because you have to collect up all the revenue from time logs for that period, and divide that by scheduled hours. You probably need a good timesheet and project management app to do that.

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Project Mgrs like Task Linking

You can’t put a roof on new construction without a foundation and walls. The same is true with many projects. One task must be done before another. Some tasks are dependent upon the completion of others, and there is no way around it. Those task dependencies are called links. Watch this video below for some ideas.

Project managers like task links because they represent reality, as illustrated above. Sometimes tasks that are linked together like this surprise you because realize your “hot” project simply cannot be completed when you first thought. There are tasks that stretch out into the hazy future because of these dependencies.

That’s when you start thinking… there has got to be a way around this.

But that thought never even occurs to you until you see the linked tasks blowing up your sweet delivery date. Sure, you can add more resources, reduce the scope, accept additional costs, all in an effort to “draw in” the ship date. But the fact is, those task dependencies, and how they stretch our your project schedule are the problem. But at least you now see the issue.

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Project Managers Track Time

All the modern project managers are using Standard Time®. None of this old-timey directors of organization and administration for them. Watch how they get straight to the project tasks and resource management. Tasks are linked and assigned to engineers. Resource allocation blowups are fixed. Employees have access to their tasks immediately, and time logs start rolling in. Windows desktops, web, Android, and iPhones are lighting up with a beehive of activity.

The managers now have actuals to compare with estimates. They are rearranging tasks, closing others, and consolidating. These project managers love the blending of employee timesheets with their PM tools.

This is how project managers got modern.

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Project Manager has Task Alerts

Task alerts take some of the excruciating delays out of project management. That’s how it’s done in the modern world.

Tasks cannot go on forever. You know that. You need them worked and completed as fast as possible. Linger too long, and your project is so far over budget you’ll never make a profit. That’s where task alerts help. They pop up as a subtle reminder that the task is nearing completion. Employees are reminded to finish up and move on. No camping out on familiar tasks, and ditching the scary ones. Another popup occurs when you’ve entered too many hours. Employees are locked out until admins add more hours to the task. Nobody wants that kind of confrontation, so they finish up on time, most of the time.

In this video, workers know they can’t linger forever. Only fifty more units today!

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Why the PMO Needs a Timesheet

Here’s what to do when the PMO office is asking for a timesheet on every desk.  (Yes, it’s not really PMO Office is it? It’s Project Management Office, so I don’t need the extra office after it. Well gosh, it just sounds better that way. 🙂 )

Okay, with that out of the way… The PMO is probably wanting to get employee hours so they can compare with task estimates. After all, there’s not much point in predicting task completions, and scheduling tasks without timesheet hours from employees.

Scroll down for a video (it’s a long ways down there)

Huge things happen when you inject actual employee hours into project schedules. It’s turning loose a basket of cats. Things happen you never thought of. Employees work on projects and tasks you didn’t expect. They finish up tasks, or cancel them altogether. They spend ten times as long as they should on others. Tasks get switched to other employees. And those employees send them back because they don’t have the resources to complete them. Sometimes team leaders jump into tasks they aren’t assigned to. Or split tasks into two or three new ones.

See how confusing this can get?

A project schedule alone is almost useless. It needs employee hours to bring it to life. And, it needs employee input. Employees should have the ability to modify tasks, create tasks, and delete them. If they don’t get that privilege, they should at least have the ability to suggest such changes, because they are the boots on the ground and usually know best what’s going on.

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Colors Signify Project Status

Do you like to use colors to signify project status? Here’s a way to do it.

Let’s say you use green to indicate that a project is a go. And Red to signify no-go. Maybe yellow means proceed with caution while we wait for final client approval. Or, maybe you use colors for project priority to help employees remember which projects are the most important ones to work on. In any case, you have the ability to colorize projects for your purposes.

Project colors are applied to

  1. Timesheet projects
  2. Project Task headers
  3. Gantt task bar (which can also be overridden with their own task color)

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Animated: 5 Things to do When Your Project Sucks

My project sucks! It’s 19 trillion dollars over budget! Even the rats are jumping ship! I think we’re going down. Help!!!

We know the feeling. Once a project gets out of control, morale is gone and everyone believes the project is doomed so they won’t lift a finger to fix it. Fortunately, there are some simple steps to restore confidence. The video below has some ideas.

Confidence returns when people know the project is being managed properly. Of course, it’s easy to oversimplify and claim that these simple things can fix any issue. Things can get very complex, but consider the possibility that the complexities may have moved you away from the basics. In other words, you may no longer be practicing the basics that keep projects in line. Your complexities may have pushed those basics aside.

Try going back to the basics and see what happens. It might work. 🙂