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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. 🙂

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Quick Questions: Categories for Time Tracking

Define the kinds of work you do with customizable lists. The items in this list are called Categories.

So what good are categories for time tracking? (the video below tells, or read on…)

Categories break your work down to the basics. How much time do your project team spend on design work? Development? Testing? Sales? Meetings? Categories can tell you that.

It doesn’t matter which projects you worked on. It doesn’t matter which client or task. For now, you just care about how much time is spent on each type of work. Do you spend more than 10% on admin? More than 5% on meetings? Notice that those things are not project related. How about more than 25% on design? Or 50% on development. Those items are project related, but you don’t care which project. You just want to know how much time is spent on the basic activity.

Assign categories to project tasks, and you will instantly know these breakdowns. You can even get a pie chart that shows the breakdown. That would probably be interesting to know!

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Quick Questions: Project Assignments By Skill

Find the right employee for your project. Search by skill, certification or discipline and find out if the employee is available at the time you need them.

Project managers use the technique in this video to find employees to add to their projects. Each employee has a list of comma-separated skills, disciplines, or certifications. Project managers can search for employees by those skills. Their availability is shown, which helps the PM decide if that person is right for the job.

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Whiteboard: Project Portfolio Management

Here’s a project management tip: collect projects into portfolios for reporting and search capabilities. (scroll down for a video)

Project portfolios are really just collections of projects. It’s what you do with the whole collection that makes them special. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the actual projects inside the portfolio; I’m talking about the big black box itself — the actual portfolio. Consider what you can do with the entire entity.

At the bottom of this discussion are employees busy tracking time to actual projects. They don’t care or know anything about the portfolios their projects are in. They just know which tasks their assigned to, and getting those done.

At the top of the discussion are big boxes called portfolios. They just happen to contain active (and perhaps inactive) projects. But it’s the portfolio we’re interested in. How much time did we spend? How much money did we make? Which portfolios are the most profitable? And the losers? Should we shift priorities to include certain portfolios, or keep things as they are?

These are the kinds of high-level questions you can ask of project portfolios, and what typically make up the “scary” subject of Project Portfolio Management. Now that you know what it is, don’t let it scare you; instead, start using the phrase around the office and try out some of these techniques.

You’ll be an instant project management expert!

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Quick Questions: Linking Project Tasks

I’m surprised at how few people know what task linking is. In fact, they may have never linked two tasks together. Sure… they track time to project tasks. They know the value of comparing estimates with actuals. And they see the value in completing tasks on a timely basis so they can be closed out and newer tasks started.

But they don’t link one task to another. (scroll down for video)

Linking tasks is actually pretty simple. And valuable. With a Gantt chart, you’ll instantly see that one task must end before another can start. In the video below, the example is building a house, where the roofing cannot start until there’s at least a foundation and some walls. That’s what task linking is all about.

Some tasks absolutely cannot start until other things are done first. That’s called a dependency. Set up those link dependencies, and you’ll get instant value from them.

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Quick Questions: Gantt chart

Henry Gantt invented a chart that is named after him in 1910. This chart is still active today and is used in Standard Time®. It shows the start and finish dates for tasks. And instantly shows the relationship between them.

This is a nice column to display the in the project tasks view. That is, if you are scheduling tasks in projects. Text alone is difficult to visualize. The Gantt chart instantly removes all difficulty in scheduling.

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Quick Questions: Task Warnings

What? Employees are camping out on fun tasks, and ditching the losers?

What does that even mean? (scroll down for a video to explain)

It means people sometimes like to stay where they’re at. They like familiarity. Easy work. Tasks where they can switch on the autopilot and Facebook all day.  Okay, fine… Not everybody is a shiftless lay-about. We take our jobs seriously. And our careers. But still… sometimes it’s nice to just keep working the same tasks until they are just “perfect.”

Task warnings shut that stuff off.

They pop up when tasks are supposed to be nearly complete. And they stop time logging when no more time is allowed. That nudges employees to move on and finish projects up. Heck, you can’t afford not to these days.