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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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Track Time for Engineering Projects

Engineers undertake the biggest projects in modern times. Don’t be caught using a spreadsheet keeping track of your time.  Sure, spreadsheets are nice; they calculate and organize every kind of engineering data imaginable. But we have to draw the line when it comes to entering engineering hours against project. They just don’t work. Here’s why:

  1. When you track engineering time in a spreadsheet, it’s usually only one person. That person becomes a bottleneck. They get weary of the job and make mistakes. There are time tracking apps for this work, which decentralize and collect time where and when it actually occurs. That makes the hours more accurate and more granular
  2. When that one person enters employ hours, they have to find a spot to put them. If there isn’t an appropriate task for the work, they make things up. Why not let the actual employees create their own tasks and enter the correct hours for them. Making stuff up never helped anyone.
  3. Spreadsheets have some pretty cool graphs. But they can’t run complex routines that build the kinds of graphs you need in engineering project management. Instead, you just get summations and statistics. Those are helpful, but maybe not exactly what you’re looking for.

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Engineering Directors Dream

Don’t wake me up I’m having a great dream! All the engineers are getting Standard Time®.

See the dream below………

That’s an awesome dream for the engineering director. She’s getting a timesheet on every desk to track engineering hours. She can use that to compare actuals with estimates. That alone is valuable because project schedules without actuals are not so great schedules (real actuals, coming from real employees, that is). Forget about copying down what somebody said they worked, and typing them into the ‘Actual work’ field. That’s almost as bad as no actuals at all.

But in this awesome dream, the engineering director sees employees closing out tasks they’re finished with. It’s hard to say just how great that little advantage is. That small thing informs project managers that tasks can be set aside and not worried about anymore. Communication in any form is wonderful. But this really helps the PM keep track of stuff.

Here’s the cool thing about this director’s dream: It goes beyond just the engineering team. You have PTO and vacation tracking for the HR folks. And you’ve got reporting for the executives. Hey, that’s sounding an awful lot like an enterprise project timesheet.

Tell us your dream!

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Milestone Billing

Many consultants and freelancers bill clients by date range. In other words, all the time and materials for a chosen date range are included on invoices. But did you know you can use invoicing milestones instead?

Scroll down for a video on the topic

Let’s say you have a flat-rate project. The client has agreed to pay a fixed amount for the entire job. Plus, you and the client have agreed on a payment schedule. Such schedules commonly include some amount up-front, sometimes an amount in the middle, and the remainder at completion. Those are payment milestones are a contractual agreement.

Now that you have agreed to the milestone payments, you can put them into your timesheet software and bill accordingly. The video below demonstrates three ways to bill clients by milestone.

1. Bill clients by date range

Just choose a date range, and the software will find all the time and materials that fall in between those dates. Those will be totaled up for the invoice.

2. Bill clients a fixed amount of the project

Enter a dollar amount, and the invoice will include that amount. The time and material may also be included on the invoice, but the invoice subtotal will use this specified amount.

3. Bill clients a percentage of the project

Enter a percentage of the total project amount. The invoice subtotal will be a percentage of the total fixed bid. Time and materials may also be included, but their costs will not be used for the invoice subtotal.

 

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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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Whiteboard: Timesheet Approvals

There’s one really big advantage to timesheet approvals. In other words, having managers check employee timesheets for correctness. That advantage is the value you get from another set of eyes. Mistakes are easy to make; everyone does it. But having a backup eliminates most of them. That’s what timesheet approvals are all about.

Scroll down for video

Here is the process:

  1. Employee fills in timesheet
  2. Or, if the employee forgets to fill in the timesheet by Monday, an email reminder is sent
  3. Employee re-checks the numbers, and clicks “Submit for Approval”
  4. An email is sent to the manager
  5. Managers view a list of everyone who have submitted their timesheets
  6. Managers view each employee timesheet
  7. Numbers are re-checked
  8. Managers approve or reject timesheets
  9. Employees optionally fix rejected timesheets
  10. Managers lock timesheets so no more changes can be made
  11. Employee receive an error when attempting to change a locked timesheet

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Whiteboard: Mileage Tracking

Consultants and road warriors now have a mileage tracking solution. Watch the video below and then check out ST. Track mileage and expenses for tax purposes.

There’s a really neat way to track odometer readings for multiple vehicles. Just tap on the vehicle field, and choose the one you’re driving. The last odometer reading you entered pops up as the starting number. You can change that, or keep as is. Then enter either the mileage or the ending odometer reading. In either case, the ending value will pop up the next time you choose that vehicle. That small feature makes mileage entry easy.

You’ll find that your time, expenses, and mileage all sync with the cloud or desktop. So everything you see on your desktop is also on your phone.

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Quick Questions: Billable and Non-Billable Time

When you’re a consultant, you log billable hours. No big secret there. But you probably also log non-billable hours for internal or administrative non-project work. After all, you want to keep track of all your time, not just the client billable hours.

Each time log in ST has a checkbox for “Billable.” That let’s you select between client work, and internal work. Actually… you might perform non-billable work for a client, so this checkbox doesn’t clearly designate non-client work.

To clearly differentiate between client and non-client work, you should create a “client” for your own company. Any time you log internal hours, consider using your own company for that time. Set up internal admin projects that are assign to your own company. Create non-billable tasks for those admin projects. When you log time to those tasks (under those admin projects) you’ll be logging time to your company. The “Billable” checkbox will be unchecked, plus the client will be your own company. That fully resolves the internal-verses-external client question.  It also means that client invoices will never contain your internal time and expenses.

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Animated: Why Standard Time is Hot in Manufacturing

Guess what’s hot in manufacturing project tracking?

Barcode scanning. (scroll down for the video)

Turns out you can scan a few simple barcodes to track manufacturing time.  Scan your employee badge to let the system know who you are. Scan a task name to let it know which job or product you’re on. A timer records the exact starting time for the work. Scan the word “STOP” and the timer stops.

In those few scans, you have just collected the following information:

  1. How much time each employee takes to do their work
  2. How much time each product takes
  3. The total time for each product or package
  4. Average time for each kind of job

Manufacturing is all about efficiency and cost. A few barcodes may surprise you. You may be spending more time than you thought. Or certain jobs are costing you a lot more than you ever imagined. Or secondary jobs may be crowding out your core competencies. Without the exact time measurements, you may never know.

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Whiteboard: Timesheet Pay Periods

Most project timesheets display just one week of days: M – F plus Sat and Sun. That’s cool, but there’s an option in ST to display a full pay period.

What’s ST? Watch this video and find out.  🙂

Pay periods are usually set up to match payroll.  Let’s say you get paid on the 15th of over month, and then the last day of the month. Those are pay periods. Between those dates, you need to know exactly which days to log hours, and the total hours for the pay period. Fortunately, you can configure your timesheet to do that.

You’ll see every day of the pay period, and be able to scroll through them. Pay period totals show how many hours are scheduled for the date range, and how many have been logged so far. That lets you compare your actual hours with expected hours, since expected hours may change for each pay period.