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Quick Questions: Quick Task Timer Window

Need to know exactly how long your projects are taking? Or how long tasks take? Or employees are working? There a timesheet feature for that. (scroll down to see it in action, and see the “deer slayer” explain everything)

The Quick Task window is your time tracking answer.

Every task that shows up in your timesheet also shows up in the Quick Task window. There is a checkbox next to each one. Ever seen it? Choose View, Quick Tasks to open the QT window. And just click the checkbox to start and stop the timer. That makes time tracking easy.

Do that for a while and see what happens.

You’ll quickly see how long you’re spending on projects. The actual start and stop times guarantee that. Reports will collect up all that project time and show the total. Or, you can click the Project Tasks tab to see each task total, and the project total at the top.

You’ll see a dozen other things in the Project Tasks tab worth checking out. Most of that information is based on the actual hours you collected when tracking task hours in the Quick Task window. Here are some of them: Actual work, percent complete, client cost, client actual cost.

So you see… this is more than just a time tracker!

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Whiteboard: Project Portfolio Management

Here’s a project management tip: collect projects into portfolios for reporting and search capabilities. (scroll down for a video)

Project portfolios are really just collections of projects. It’s what you do with the whole collection that makes them special. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the actual projects inside the portfolio; I’m talking about the big black box itself — the actual portfolio. Consider what you can do with the entire entity.

At the bottom of this discussion are employees busy tracking time to actual projects. They don’t care or know anything about the portfolios their projects are in. They just know which tasks their assigned to, and getting those done.

At the top of the discussion are big boxes called portfolios. They just happen to contain active (and perhaps inactive) projects. But it’s the portfolio we’re interested in. How much time did we spend? How much money did we make? Which portfolios are the most profitable? And the losers? Should we shift priorities to include certain portfolios, or keep things as they are?

These are the kinds of high-level questions you can ask of project portfolios, and what typically make up the “scary” subject of Project Portfolio Management. Now that you know what it is, don’t let it scare you; instead, start using the phrase around the office and try out some of these techniques.

You’ll be an instant project management expert!

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Quick Questions: Time Tracking for Mac

Yes, Standard Time® does run on Apple products. That includes the desktop-Mac, iPhone and iPad. The screens look just like the PC screens.

The video below shows Standard Time on a Safari web browser. You can track time and expenses, plus PTO and vacation accruals. Every timesheet and time tracking feature you might see on Windows or Linux is available on the Mac. And it runs as nice as any browser.

Just so you know, this is not a native Mac time tracking app. But it does work nicely on Safari browser on the Mac. The actual app is running on a Windows IIS Web server, and is being served up to any clients that wish to log in. Those clients could be Windows systems or Mac or Linux or any other. Windows is just the server, but any client can log in.

Standard Time does not have a native Mac app. But it does have a native iOS app that runs natively on iPhone and iPad. That version is available in the Apple Store. It’s not as functional as the version you see in the video below. The native iOS time tracking app is intended for short bursts of use while away from the office, like at client sites or at home. It syncs with the Web Edition you see here using web services over your data plan or Wi-Fi. All your time and expense records end up on the Windows Server database where they are available for reporting and decision-making.

Check out the Safari browser running Standard Time below.

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Quick Questions: Viewing Employee Time

Here are some simple steps to view your employee’s timesheets.

Managers need the ability to check employee time so they can verify that hours are correctly logged to projects and tasks. Of course, employees can’t look in on other people’s time, but administrators can if they have permissions to do so.

Simply follow these steps to check your employee timesheets.

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Quick Questions: Timesheet Pay Periods

Your timesheet can be closely tied to your payroll pay periods. One way is to configure it to show all the days of the current pay period instead of just one week.

video below

Most timesheets show only seven days. But sometimes employees wish to see the full pay period so they can make sure all the working days are filled in. Nobody wants a short paycheck just because their timesheet isn’t filled in. It’s nice to see a weekly view from Monday to Friday, but sometimes even more helpful to see the full pay period.

Here’s what you see:

  1. Every day of the pay period
  2. The total scheduled hours for the pay period
  3. The total hours entered for the pay period
  4. The starting and ending dates
  5. The ability to submit your timesheet for the full pay period, rather than just one week

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Quick Questions: Submitting Timesheets

If you’re in a consulting firm, you know that billable hours are your livelihood. Losing hours is not an option. Lose too many, and you’ll be consulting somewhere else. Every consultant must be utilized to the max, and every hour must be accounted for.

Time is money.                                                     scroll down for a video…

In that light, the management overhead of submitting and approving timesheets is a small price to pay for accurate billing. Think of it as another set of eyes on your most valuable asset — consultants, and their billable hours.

Managers can view a list of employees who have submitted their timesheets. Emails go out to those who have forgotten. Another email goes to managers, and lists employees who forgot. Now managers can check each timesheet and approve it.

What are they looking for? Correct time under clients, projects, tasks, and time periods.

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Quick Questions: Linking Project Tasks

I’m surprised at how few people know what task linking is. In fact, they may have never linked two tasks together. Sure… they track time to project tasks. They know the value of comparing estimates with actuals. And they see the value in completing tasks on a timely basis so they can be closed out and newer tasks started.

But they don’t link one task to another. (scroll down for video)

Linking tasks is actually pretty simple. And valuable. With a Gantt chart, you’ll instantly see that one task must end before another can start. In the video below, the example is building a house, where the roofing cannot start until there’s at least a foundation and some walls. That’s what task linking is all about.

Some tasks absolutely cannot start until other things are done first. That’s called a dependency. Set up those link dependencies, and you’ll get instant value from them.

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Quick Questions: Gantt chart

Henry Gantt invented a chart that is named after him in 1910. This chart is still active today and is used in Standard Time®. It shows the start and finish dates for tasks. And instantly shows the relationship between them.

This is a nice column to display the in the project tasks view. That is, if you are scheduling tasks in projects. Text alone is difficult to visualize. The Gantt chart instantly removes all difficulty in scheduling.

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Quick Questions: Milestone Invoicing

Projects are often billed on a one-third, one-third, one-third method. Meaning that you bill 1/3 of the total amount up front, then 1/3 somewhere in the middle, and then finally 1/3 when the project is delivered.

Here’s an easy way to do that. Scroll down for the video

You just set up a milestone configured for a percentage of the project amount. Let’s say the deal is for $30,000. The milestone is set up for 33.333%. Multiple $30,000 times 33.333% and you get $10,000 (rounded up).

Each of the three invoices can use the same milestone. That makes fixed-price billing easy.

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Whiteboard: Blocks of Support Time

Are you a consultant? Do you sell blocks of support time to your customers?

Then this video is for you. Scroll down to watch.

You should consider using project tasks to represent blocks of support time you sell to clients. Here how they work:

  1. You create a project task to represent the block to time
  2. Set the ‘Duration’ to the number of hours you sold
  3. Set the ‘Percent Warning’ to 75%
  4. Set the ‘Percent Error’ to 100%
  5. Assign the task to consultants who will be logging hours
  6. When the 75% limit is triggered, you will get an email
  7. Go back to the client and sell the next block
  8. When the 100% limit is triggered, you won’t be able to log any more hours

Sweetness and cool.  🙂