A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Here’s a graph of employee availability in Standard Time®. It shows when employees are available for work. This is a lot like a resource allocation graph, but inverted. The bars show when employees are available, unlike a resource allocation chart where the bars show hours the employee has work assigned.
You’ll need this if you are a consulting, engineering, or manufacturing organization. It’s important to see when employees have projects assigned. Standard Time provides that.
This video shows how the Standard Time timesheet displays project tasks. Each timesheet is different for each employee. That makes things pretty handy!
Here’s a new video showing the Standard Time Android and iOS apps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIbkf4SEXzc
All your time and expenses sync with the cloud or desktop. So you can track project hours on the mobile device and it will find it’s way up to the big database in the sky. Project managers like that because they get more accurate project time. Remember, the more frequently employees enter hours, the accurate the project is.
Project schedules depend on accurate actuals. So if you can get them to update their timesheets on a regular basis, then you’re farther ahead. That’s what this app does. It encourages employee input when the actual work is performed.
Good question! What is a project milestone?
Think of a project milestone as a marker in time where you stop and evaluate your project.
How is your project going? Have you completed everything necessary to move on to the next level? Have you finished everything in this milestone? And are you ready to move forward to the next one?
The video below shows what milestones look like in a Gantt chart, and how to track time to them. But normally you don’t actually track time to milestones. They are just markers in time, not actual tasks. But you can if you want to. In fact, you could set up a project with nothing but milestones! Just track hours to them and compare against your original estimates. That’s a simple way to track projects.
In the old days, a milestones was a physical stone erected by the road. There would be one stone every mile. Just count the stones as you waked along, and you would know how far you had traveled, and how far the next town was. They were just like our interstate mile markers now.
Project milestones are very similar. They tell you how far into the project you have traveled. Got a big project? Put up a milestone every so often and you’ll know where you are.
The video below may be useful for some. Ray White of the Standard Time® Timesheet team outlines eight dirty secrets of project tracking. These make a lot of sense. Take a look!
What did you think? Project tracking is a slippery game. You’ve literally got thousands of enemies and obstacles that will bring your project down. It takes a watchful individual to make sure those things don’t happen. And a project manager who can do that is worth their money.
I was once on a project where the manager made us all sign a paper that said we’d finish the project by a certain date. It was a big event where the paper was passed around for all to sign. Honestly, most just laughed, signed, and mocked him later. Here’s why: he never followed up with any real management. He committed virtually every sin in this video.
Even though we signed the paper, he had no real end-game plan. We just all worked on stuff we thought was cool. The project blew through the ship date and died an ugly death from suffocation. He didn’t track our hours. He let the cool kids camp out on tasks they liked, which left the rotten tasks unfinished.
I never really know when the product would ship because it was always a moving target. And like I said, the project died of suffocation months later. Hummph.
Hey, I found the video transcription on this page. Hope it helps!http://www.stdtime.com/videos/dirtysecretsofprojecttracking.htm
–newshirt
What is the Task Usage view in Microsoft Project? The simple answer is: a daily breakdown of the hours for each employee. You’re probably familiar with the ‘Work’ and ‘Actual work’ columns in the Gantt view, right? The Task Usage view just breaks those numbers down by day. The video below illustrates that perfectly.
Standard Time® with MSP Task Usage
So let’s assume you have a task with 100 hours scheduled to you and another employee. That 100 hours is in the ‘Work’ column in the Gantt view. (Ignore the ‘Duration’ column for sake of easy explanation for now. It has a different purpose.) The ‘Work’ field tells how many hours the resources are supposed to work. Here’s a picture of how that task looks in the Gantt view and Task usage view.
And Task Usage View:
These two screenshots clearly show the 100 hours for our example. The Gantt view shows the aggregate while the Task usage view shows the daily breakdown. Now watch what happens when we add ‘Actual work’ to the mix. The Task usage view lets you enter hours for the exact day they occurred. And again, the Gantt view shows the aggregate hours. (The video above shows an automated way to enter those actual work hours.)
Of course the automated way to enter these actual work hours is a timesheet. (I like Standard Time® at www.stdtime.com.) Employees use a variety of tools to enter and check their own timesheets. Once correct, all the actual work hours from the timesheet are transferred to the Microsoft Project Task usage view in one quick session – all employees, all at once. Pretty cool, huh?
–newshirt
Has a customer of yours ever forgotten to get back with you about a feature you were developing for them? They were hot to finish, but then weeks went by and no word. Maybe the feature was almost finished, and you just needed a little more information to complete it. One phone call or email and it would be finished.
But guess what happens when these delays occur?
All the feature nuances you kept in your head are now slipping… A week goes by… Two weeks… A month… By now you’ve forgotten some of the little details that made finishing the feature so simple. You’ll have to relearn some of those and get the feature back on track. What would have taken a short time to complete will now take four times as longs.
When this happens, you are essentially reallocating resources to complete the job. In some cases when too much time has elapsed, you might just as well restart the project and reschedule hours to come up to speed. All that admin scheduling take time too.
Moral of the story: Don’t let these little delays creep in in first place. Stay on top of your dependent resources so they don’t leave you with a long forgetful delay.
Now, this is what the PMO office needs. Have you seen this?
The video below lists ten cool tools for the project management office. (Actually the term “PMO Office” is a little redundant.) But I really liked this set of tools. You start with a database that displays all your projects as peers — no more discreet files on your hard drive. Under each project is a list of assigned to employees. Those employees see only their projects and tasks in the timesheet where they record actual hours. Go back to the project task view and you can compare estimates with actuals.
Of course, the PMO office wants more than a simple task list. They want resource allocation, project revenue projects, utilization reports with percentages and effective rates. And they want some daily scrum status. To me… it all seems to be here. Take a look!
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVJ1AYCJ9Rw
Here’s just a quick reminder that homemade products stick out like a sore thumb. Have you ever encountered a product that was clearly not professionally produced? They just look awful, and one look at them screams, “Homemade!” or “Unprofessional!” It doesn’t take long for consumers to sniff you out and flee.
This past weekend, my wife and I stayed at a little ‘mom and pop’ motel in a little town in Colorado. With one step into the room, I got a good reminder of this issue. (See the pics below from my crap phone) The entertainment cabinet was hand-painted, and looked awful. I nearly fled the room, but decided the cost was cheap enough to entice me to stay. It turned out fine. But ugly little piece of artwork really drove this point home to me.
Consumers do not like hand-crafted products.
Let’s face it… we live in a consumer-oriented world. Almost every product we touch is machine made, and professionally crafted for maximum emotional indulgence. Think about the indulgent products you use on a daily basis: $50,000 automobiles… iPhones… stylish eyeglasses… jewelry… and more. Every product we use it slick and well-designed. So consumers are used to those kinds of products. Now slap and homemade software product in front of them, and watch them flee! Or a poorly polished plastic drinking cup… or any other product you can imagine. Consumers expect high quality.
This issue is especially true in software, where programmers are sometimes responsible for developing the entire product from code to help files to graphics. Software developers just don’t have the talents for all those jobs, and it’s very obvious when they try. The results are a lot like the Riviera Motel. Can you guess where it’s located?
— Henry Ford
That has certainly been true in my life. To me, business has been something deeply ingrained in my life. For many years, I wrote code on Christmas Day, New Years Day, Independance Day, and many other holidays.
Yes, I loved it that much.
I would do events I called “24-hour weekends” where I would start coding at 7 AM each morning and go straight until 7 PM on both Saturday and Sunday — two twelve hours days. And then I would resume my normal 60-hour week on Monday morning at 5:30 AM. That’s how much I loved my business.
Things have changed a little since I’ve gotten older. Economic downturns turn you hard. Turn you bitter. Make you cynical. And you say, “What good was all that work?” So yes… I’ve had times where I’ve quit and vowed never to do that again. I’ve actually quit my business several times. But like a dog to his vomit, I’ve always returned. And after doing that a dozen times, I guess I’m here for the duration — a lifer.
I still love my business. The current economic doldrums put a severe throttle on my work efforts. It’s awfully hard to put your life into something (and that’s what Henry was really saying in the quote above) when customers don’t reciprocate with any degree of appreciation. But I still work hard. I might even pull a few of those 24-hour weekends from time to time just to remind myself of the love I still have for my business.