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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.

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Quick Questions: Billing Rates By Role

For each project an employee may have a different role and different billing rate. The following video shows how to organize them.

Consider that on any given project, employees could take a different role or responsibility.  You may be the team lead on Project A, but just an ordinary engineer on Project B.  A colleague may be the project manager today, and customer liaison tomorrow. Roles change. Responsibilities change.

And the billing rates for each role also change.

Keeping track of who performs which role on every project is a job. And what billing rates are you charging for each? That’s another job.

Watch this video for one possible solution. This may be the one solution for the whole project team.

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Quick Questions: Resource Allocation

Find the employees that are free in your company to work on your project. The color coded chart makes life easier for the project manager.

Sure, you know approximately which projects and tasks everybody is working on, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a bar graph showing it?  You can research employees who might be available for your project.  Look for short bars, that indicate a shortage of work.

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Quick Questions: Creating Project Tasks

Follow these simple steps to create a project task that is displayed in the timesheet.  Scroll down for a video.

Why track time with project tasks?  Because you will be tracking much more information that just a project. It takes the same amount of time to enter hours for a task as it does a project.  But a project task contains other information that you can use to better understand the execution of your project.

For instance, project tasks are associated with categories.  Each category describes the type of work you performed.  You can run reports or comparisons on categories.

Project tasks also contain other fields that differ from task to task.  So choosing the appropriate task means you are also choosing those other data point.  Again, use them in reports to learn more about where your time is spent.

Other useful association may exist, such as payroll information, estimates verses actuals, and link dependencies based on task completion, and warnings when tasks are nearly finished.

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Interview: Email notifications

“I forgot to put in my time.” This happens a lot; Standard Time® sends out email notifications to employees who need to add time to their timesheet.

Yep, happens a lot.

There are other reason to get email notifications from your project timesheet.  You’ll get one when you’re added to a new project, or if you have upcoming tasks, or tasks that are due.

So… your project schedule is now automatically reminding you to pay attention and keep up.  🙂

Actually, that’s not a bad thing.  Think of it as a little extra help… a little reminder… and a way to keep project tasks, and their expeditious completion, at the forefront of your mind.  That’s how projects get finished.