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Project Portfolio Management

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.

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Project Costing and Billing Rates

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®.

  1. User rates
  2. Category rates
  3. Project rates
  4. Role rates
  5. 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.

 

 

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Employee Skill Availability

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.

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Future Project Billing Rates

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.

Watch the video for details.

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Simple Timesheet Notes

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.

 

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Project Revenue Win/Loss Chart

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.

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Project Management

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.

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Project Portfolios

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!

 

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Customer Login and App

Customers can now see the status of their projects without bugging you! They just log-in to Standard Time® and get an update. Or use Android app called ProjectBot.

Customers want project status.  And they sometimes want it frequently… like every day!

Fortunately, there is a simple solution.  Standard Time has a simple client login page where your customers can log in to get their status.  All their projects are listed.  They can see how many hours were allocated, and how many hours were logged.  Simple.

Android ProjectBot

Plus, there’s even a simpler way.  There’s an Android app called ProjectBot that does the same thing.  Except that it does it automatically.  Every 15 minutes, ProjectBot syncs with the cloud and pulls down all the project information for that client.  The client can simply look at the app for the status.  That makes things pretty simple!

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Project manager is so screwed

Is it time for this project manager to take a plane to Mexico or Cuba? No, he can redeem the project with Standard Time®.  Enjoy the lighter side of project management!

Did you like the cartoon?  Let us know.  Here’s how.  Subscribe to the ScoutwestInc YouTube channel, and then click thumbs up.

All kidding aside, any project can be resurrected from the dead.  But some are not so easy.  Some organizations have so much politics and infighting that their projects are doomed from the start.  Resurrecting a project in one of these organizations sometimes means changing the way people think.  That’s sometimes not so easy.  Everyone is right in their own eyes.  They can’t see the trouble they’ve made for themselves.  And the project manager doesn’t always have a clear vision, or even the means to inspire others to follow it.  Implementing a nice project tracker like ST doesn’t always do it.  You need a true visionary to pull projects out of the ditch.

So sure… it’s easy to poke fun at failing projects.  But not always so easy to resurrect them.  But why not try?  Put a good timesheet product in place, and see what happens!