A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
This video will show you how to change terminologies in Standard Time®. They can be changed throughout the entire system or in a specific place. It can be customized however you choose.
For instance, let’s say you use the word “Program” or “Plan” instead of “Project.” Or, the word “Assembly” instead of “Category.” Use the techniques in this video to change them in the system.
If you are billing clients for projects, you definitely want a system that gracefully handles multiple billing rates.
Ultimately, you want to potentially have different rates for each project, and for each user or role on the project.
Let’s say Josh is the project manager on the Alcoa job. And Alice is the engineer. Rates for Josh and Alice will not likely be the same. Now let’s take another example. Ted is the now the project manager on the Union Pacific job, and Josh is taking a lower engineering role. Again, the rates for Josh and Ted are not likely going to be the same. They have different roles, so their billing rates should be different.
The video below is describing this exact scenario.
Customize what is seen in your timesheet. Not only can you choose your favorite projects, you can also choose the columns you see, and the totals at the top and bottom.
This video describes choosing timesheet columns. Various project fields can help when filling out your timesheet.
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.
Here are a few other videos to learn more:
http://www.stdtime.com/videos/resourceallocation.htm
http://www.stdtime.com/videos/employeeavailability.htm
With the Standard Time® timesheet see only the projects and tasks you’re working on. You don’t have to wade through all your coworkers stuff, only your own!
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.
A certain PMO office which we talked to defined project management ‘supply and demand’ this way. (The video below describes it in detail. Scroll down.)
1. Demand: Product line managers ask employees to work a certain percentage of their daily schedule on a series of projects.
2. Supply: The actual employees supply their hours to the projects they want to work on.
Hopefully, the demand and the supply end up the same. But sometimes not. Sometimes, employees don’t feel the priorities are correct, or tactics on the ground don’t work out exactly as the managers planned. In any case, there may be a gap between the demand and the actual hours supplied by employees. It is that gap that should be understood.
Are managers asking for too much? Or setting unrealistic priorities that can never be executed by employees? Or misunderstanding the ground-pounders?
Or… are employees just overriding the strategery set forth by upper management? Do they ‘get’ the vision at all? Or are they just unable to execute the plan?
Usually, the supply and demand do match. People try to get along. And strategies like this usually work out just as planned. But if they don’t, perhaps a meeting of the minds is justified. But at least you know when gaps exist. It’s a tool to help align management and staff.
Hope it helps! 🙂
Connect the Standard Time timesheet to SQL Server.
These links may also help:
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®.
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.