Do you have an engineer available for a project? How do you know? What tasks are they working on? Are they over-worked? Or under?
There are answers to all these questions. Scroll down and watch this video for some ideas.
Get a bar chart of upcoming work an engineer is assigned to. How is the chart built? It comes from projects the employee is assigned to, and specific tasks.
If you’re like most companies, you perform multiple projects for each client. You may perform them serially, or several at once. Each one may have different billing rates. They may have different tasks. Different starting and due dates. Watch the video below to see the relationship between projects and clients. This is a good way to manage projects.
Watch this video below for tips on managing portfolios of projects. A project portfolio contains one or more projects with similar characteristics. For instance, you might put all your consulting projects into one portfolio. Or, you might put marketing or sales together. Or, there may be completely different lines along which your projects naturally fall. Those belong in portfolios.
Once you have placed projects into a portfolio, you can do special things with them. Try running reports for all projects in a portfolio, or comparing one portfolio against another. You can see project revenue for a single selected portfolio. Or you could filter the resource allocation chart for a selected portfolio.
Consider how you might group your projects for effective portfolio reporting.
Unique costs and billing rates can be set for every project. Even if you have 500 different projects each can have a different rate.
There are actually five different project costing models in Standard Time®.
User rates
Category rates
Project rates
Role rates
Option Year rates
You can choose any of those these for a given project. That means each project task and each time log associated with a project can potentially compute client and salary rates differently. Usually, the same choices are made for all projects, and just the user rates are changed for each one. But, you could change the model for each project.
Ever wonder if an employee is scheduled for tasks next month? Or next week?
How would you know? Ask them?
There’s another way. Schedule some tasks, assign employees, and then open this resource availability window. You’ll see a graph of all the hours an employee has available to them. If there are gaps, schedule more tasks. Maybe you should ask them first, but then do it, and you’ll have some nice documentation that shows who is scheduled and who is not.
And, there’s a flip-side to this.
Resource allocation is the flip-side to employee availability. In other words, an employee is available when they are not allocated to tasks.
You might have a need to find resources by their skillsets. Looking for an ‘Engineer 1’ or ‘Engineer 2’ qualification? Use this tool to find them. You can then assign them to your project… after asking them first. (People aren’t machines. And you probably shouldn’t call them ‘resources’ either. They are human beings and like to be consulted before blindly signed up for anything.)
Watch the video to see if this might be useful to you and your project.
With Standard Time® an administrator can predict how much a project will cost. The dates for the project are sometimes far enough into the future that you must set future rates. You can create date ranges that contain future billing rates.
For example, suppose you needed to predict project costs into 2017 and 2018. (still future at the time of the article)
The salary and billing rates are likely different for those future years. You may not know exactly what they will be, but you have an idea. The software lets you enter your predictions, and uses them for tasks that are scheduled to begin then.
So, back to our 2017 and 2018 example… your future rates will be used for tasks that are scheduled on those future dates. Each task has a starting date. Each task is assigned to users. So, the user rates for those dates are incorporated into the cost of each task.
A task in 2018 may cost more than a task in 2017. The software knows this.
Standard Time® allows you to put notes in with your time. Keep track of projects and remind yourself along the way!
These timesheet notes can serve many purposes. They can find their way onto client invoices. They can act as project status in a report. Or, they can simply remind you of what you did. Consider this the biggest project communication tool you have. It is your memory… it is your direct communication to clients and consumers of your project work… and it is historical documentation your organization can rely on.
All that from a simple edit field in a project timesheet?
Not really… there are other time log fields that serve the same purpose. Don’t overlook the start and stop times. Those simple fields mean a lot to consumers of your work. The date alone is big. The timestamp is better, but not always necessary or used. And consider that the project, subproject, client, and category all help to categorize the work you do. All that is collected without a lot of effort, but those who view your historical records find it invaluable.
Standard Time® lets you see revenue estimates for your projects. Project revenue estimates are like Win/Loss charts. Another analogy is the traditional sales funnel. You win some projects, you lose others. And when predicting, you set a percentage of likely win. This chart shows the possible outcome over the next 12 months.
Manage the projects and tasks that show up in the timesheet. Employees only see tasks that are assigned to them. That makes collecting time for tasks easier. Employees aren’t so barraged with projects and tasks that they can’t find the ones they are working on.
Group your projects into portfolios and get reports, graphs and metrics.
Grouping projects by portfolio is a simple way to perform operations for like projects. What does that mean? It means if you want a report for a certain group of projects, put them in a portfolio and run the report on that portfolio. Or if you want to see tasks allocated to users on just a certain group of projects, again, put them into a portfolio and view the resource allocation window. Other such operation might be viewing a project revenue chart, or viewing resource utilization reports for a certain portfolio of projects.
Project portfolio management is built into Standard Time®. So whenever you need a see a report or chart or graph, look for the option to view only the projects in a chosen portfolio.
Project revenue by portfolio
For instance, project revenue is a great use of portfolios. Lets say you need to view project revenue estimates for the consulting jobs. Or a certain manufacturing process. Or geographical region. Just put the projects that matter into a portfolio, and your revenue chart shows only them. Nice!
Project resource allocation by portfolio
Another great application for portfolios is viewing project task allocation by portfolio. Let’s say you want to see how tasks are assigned to the consulting projects, or by type of project. Again, portfolios work great. You see only those tasks assigned to projects in a selected portfolio. So, group up your projects and give it a try!