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Tracking Time for IT Support

IT support is a beehive. It’s crazy fire-fighting day, everyday. You don’t have a minute to waste. Which is why you should consider spending some extra time tracking your hours.

What???  Spend more time on admin tasks? I don’t think so! (video below)

Consider this line of reasoning. A small amount of time finding out where your time is spent can be used as intel. Think of it as recon work. You sneak in with black tactical gear, snap a few pictures, and get out. Now you’re the hero at the strategic briefing. You’re the one standing up front with the laser pointer looking down on everybody. You’re not the idiot watching the MI-5 briefing; you’re the one conducting it. Your the one presenting your findings to others to consume.

And what did you find? You found that a slight change in daily schedule turns firefighting into routine maintenance. You found that some training courses for employees reduces help-desk calls. You found that you’re spending most of your time on secondary priorities with no strategic upside. Oops. Time for some change.

Now go back and track time for the new routine to find out if those changes really made a difference. Measure and improve.

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What is a Project Triangle

What are project triangles? You’ve probably visited the project triangle wiki webpage. So, you probably know that project triangles graphically illustrate the tension between time, cost, and scope. Any one of these could cause trouble for your project if not properly managed. Watch the video below.

The cool thing is that these project triangles are displayed graphically in Standard Time®. That means you can check your own projects to see how they measure up. If you see a perfect triangle with all side of equal length (equilateral triangle) then you know your project is in good shape.

But if you see one side of the triangle going off the graph, then you know something is wrong. It means either your time, cost, or scope is out of whack.

What a nice way to check the health of your project!

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Bad Time Tracking Apps

Some time tracking apps just don’t cut it. The girls in this video are complaining about keeping track of their time with spreadsheets and paper time cards. But the manager can only think of new steam engines to make the machines go faster.

Ever think your boss is like that?

Or are you the boss?

Hey, it happens to everyone. We get stuck in older business paradigms, and can’t see new ways to do things. There are new apps for time tracking and employee timesheets. Don’t be like these managers; download one and give it a try.

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A New Time Tracking App is Out!

Even the newsboys know a good thing when they see one. All the news that’s fit to print! There’s a new time tracking app out!

Haha. Here’s a cute little video pitching Standard Time® from a newsboy perspective. All the boys are scrambling for their morning papers so they can make ten cents to go to the theater and eat goo goo beans and drink coke-a-cola.

That’s the kind of enthusiasm at Scoutwest, the makers of the Standard Time timesheet — eager to produce a good quality app everyone can use. It’s that American craftsmanship and mom and pop service you grew up with, or heard about from your granddad. But, with a modern time tracking solution as the flagship product. Isn’t that the kind of company you want to support?

You may find that they support you instead. Every feature you need for consulting, engineering, and manufacturing has been built in. Just ask, and they will point it out. Flexible billing rates, roles, task lists, project tracking, PTO accruals, expenses and mileage, and more. You won’t be saying, I wish it had this thing or that, because it probably already does.

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Download a Modern Timesheet

All the gas buggies in this video know how to get to stdtime.com for a modern timesheet. Look how they motor right in at 4 mph. But the old-timer has no clue. Did you catch him? He just wants a little axle grease to keep the wheels turning.

So the question is, what’s holding you back from adopting a modern timesheet with project tracking built in? Are you stuck in the old world? Still using spreadsheets and scraps of paper? Or worse: verbally communicating hours like they did it before the machine age?

We’ve computational engines for that now!

Whatever the case, drive out there and download a copy and test drive it. You might like all the trips and levers. And then you’ll wonder what you did without a modern timesheet.

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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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Service Techs and Route Drivers

Get a service fleet to support your customers? Route drivers? Or service techs?

Then you better track their time. Here’s why: (but watch the video first)

You could be spending a lot more than you need to. And, you may be spending time on secondary customers that don’t fit your priorities. The first issue is self-explanatory, but still pretty important. So let’s talk about the second one — the issue of priority.

Everyone prioritizes customers in terms of revenue and easy of support, right? Sure, you do it whether you know it or not. That’s only natural. You should probably codify that in a document somewhere, but that’s a secondary topic. Once you have your list of top customers, now compare that with the time you’re spending on each one.

Zowie! That could be a shocker!

What if the customers you’re spending the most time on are not the ones at the top of your “best customer” list?

Oops.

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Start a New Business

The immigrants right off the boat are learning what to do in the new world — start a new business! And they’re learning which time tracker to use. Watch and find out.

Consulting is a lucrative and satisfying occupation. When you have the right software, it’s pretty easy to make money. Of course, you will need some talent and domain knowledge that clients want. But the software makes a big difference. Make sure you have the tools to collect billable and non-billable hours. That’s the basics. Just about every time tracking app in the world promises that. But they don’t all deliver in the ways you need it. Got a timesheet with totals and dashboards? How about task timers? Email notifications? Without these basics, you’ll be fighting to collect hours that mean anything to you or the client.

Now jump up beyond the basics. Take a look at project tracking, mileage and expense tracking, PTO accruals for the whole organization. Those are some heavy hitters you should consider.

Welcome to the new world!