A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
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.
Memorizing reports make is simpler to run the same report again and again.
Have you ever run the same report over and over, and have to remember what choices you made each time? Consider “memorizing” the report.
Memorizing is just saving the choices you made when running a report. Those choices define the projects, clients, date ranges, and employees that we selected when the report was first run. If you memorize the report, you won’t have to make those choices again. You just click once on the memorized report, and it will open.
Have you ever seen a time tracking app that runs on both Windows and Web? Here’s one.
In other words, there are two platforms that let you access your timesheet and projects. One platform is the familiar Windows client. It’s a native Windows app that runs on Windows 10.
The other is a Web-based time tracking app that runs in a browser. Got Chrome? Or Microsoft Edge? This time tracking app can be accessed with either one. Or one of the many other browsers, like Safari, Firefox, or Opera.
Need to manage projects? Tasks? Subprojects and portfolios? This one does it. Admittedly, most of those project management features are in the Windows Edition only. But you’ll still see project hierarchies and portfolios in the Web app. The combination of both Windows and Web make this a compelling time tracking and project management offering.
Check it out here: www.stdtime.com