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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.

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Microsoft Project Integration

Without ‘Actual work’ from a timesheet, MS Project is just a dead schedule.  And the bigger the schedule, the worse the problem is.  Here’s why:

Huge project schedules look great the day you create them.  Every is as accurate as you can make it.  Dates, durations, resource assignments, milestones, deliveries… they’re all exactly where you hope they will be.  But all you’re doing is looking into the future with your best guess.

Problem is, by tomorrow, a portion of that future has passed.

Resources have started on their tasks.  They’ve reported back to you.  Some tasks are wrong.  Some will take more time.  Others, less time.  And the bulk of them carry a large degree of uncertainty.

Only when you get some actual hours on those tasks do you really know how accurate they are, and how they affect the schedule.

That’s why timesheet hours are important.

Import your actual work from your timesheet to your schedule, and everything changes.

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Interview: Project Portfolios

What is a project portfolio?

It is a collection of projects with some common element you care about.  For instance, you might have a collection of consulting projects.  Or a collection of in-house jobs.  Those collections are portfolios.

Look down for a video

Think of the portfolio as a packing crate.  Inside the crate are many projects.  But you can’t see them.  They are packed tightly inside.  All you can see is the crate… the portfolio.  So you manage the crate, not the contents.

What is project portfolio management?

Project portfolio management is handling entire collections of projects for the purposes of proper execution and education.

You are managing the whole collection, not just individual projects.  Your reporting, your graphing, your searches, and even setting status is done on the entire collection.  The portfolio is a ‘black box’.  You don’t look inside at the individual projects.  You don’t manage individuals, you manage the entire portfolio as if it were a packing crate.

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Earned Value Explained

Standard Time® allows a project manager to keep track of how much money the company is making on a project. Each time an engineer enters his time it will accumulate and have an earned value for that project.

Scroll down for the video.  Plus, here’s another page that describes earned value using ‘actual work’ and ‘percent complete’. After going to this page, scroll down below it for a detailed description.

http://www.stdtime.com/videos/earnedvalue.htm

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Interview: Better than a Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet looks really inviting; free! If you have a small business with a few employees and don’t have to send any invoices, then it probably is OK. But multiple projects, many employees and different billing rates for them all is when you need a professional timesheet.

All true…

But here are some reasons spreadsheet are not the best tool for tracking client hours.

  1. You can easily make the mistake of entering hours into the wrong employee.
  2. Same with the wrong project
  3. Same with the wrong client
  4. You can’t sync with a neato time tracking app like Standard Time®.
  5. You can’t easily share the spreadsheet on the web without collisions.
  6. You don’t get any email notifications when things are wrong.
  7. You don’t get any real project status.

So… that free timesheet may be costing you more than you think.

Check this out.

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Interview: Task Warnings to Keep Projects on Budget

Here’s a project management tip to help keep projects on schedule and on budget.  (scroll down to watch the video)

It’s called ‘Tasks Warnings’ and it works like this….

When employees near the end of certain tasks, a message appears telling them to finish up.  If they continue until the task is over-complete, another message will appear, and they will no longer be able to add time to the task.

This strategy nudges employees to completion, and prevents huge overruns of time and money.

Employees are encouraged (by the software) to finish early, move on to the next task, and keep the project going.

Watch the video and let us know what you think!

 

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Interview: Quick Tasks

Quick Tasks are great way to collect ‘Actual Work’ hours from employees.  Users simply click a checkbox to start a timer, and click again to stop.  Hours between those two clicks are automatically entered into the timesheet.  (scroll down for video)

No manual time entry is required.  Just click… click… click throughout the day.  All task hours are collected up in the timesheet.

Every time log created by this process has the following fields available for reporting.

  1. Start and stop time
  2. Actual duration, in hours
  3. Client and project
  4. Project task that was clicked
  5. Category to describe the type of work performed
  6. Any custom fields, copied from the project task

As you can see, you are collecting a lot of information for each click.  There is enough information to invoice clients, pay employees, expense or capitalize projects, or just see where your employee time is being spent.  All that is collected with two lowly clicks.  🙂

 

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Better Than a Spreadsheet

Are you using a spreadsheet to track time, bill clients or using multiple billing rates? Spreadsheets aren’t cost effective in this case.  Consider using Standard Time® instead.  (scroll down for the video)

Here’s the problem.  If want to track client billable hours in a spreadsheet, you’ll need rows or columns for clients, projects, employees, billing rates for each client, days, and hours.  That’s a busy spreadsheet.  In addition, you’ll need formulas and summations to arrive at client billing amounts.

Somebody has to program all that!

And somebody has to maintain the spreadsheet when new clients, projects, employees, and rates change.  Remembering where everything is can be hard enough.  But what if the person who developed the spreadsheet leaves the company?  Things get pretty hard.

There are other issues using a spreadsheet for time tracking.

Employees can’t sync their time with a smartphone time tracking app like Standard Time.  You can’t really share the spreadsheet on the web without locking it for the current user.  The spreadsheet doesn’t check to see if you entered your time into the correct user or project.  And, you could even enter time into the wrong time slot.

A professional time tracking app fixes all that.  You might find that your ‘free’ timesheet is costing you more that you realized.

Click here to download Standard Time.

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Interview: Project Rollups

Total up actual work hours with project rollups. Each column (duration, actual work, Gantt column, etc) has a total or rollup. You can see the status of your project from those totals.