A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Human resource managers should take a look at this. Send this video link to them and tell them you liked it.
This system automatically accrues hours for PTO, vacation, sick, and other reasons. You just set the rules and let it alone. As weeks go by, the system is adding new hours to everyone’s bank of PTO time. Users can then request time off and have it approved.
Watch the video for more info.
If you’re in a consulting organization, it’s important to know how many hours each employee works. It’s also important to know if those hours are billable or non-billable. You can likely paying employees whether they are bringing in billable hours or not. So it’s important to maximize billable hours, if you can.
Let’s show a few extreme examples to illustrate the point.
Example #1: Pay period of 168 hours. And only one billable hour. Billing rate $100.
That is only 0.6% utilization, and an effective billing rate of $0.60 per scheduled hour. You can’t live on sixty cents an hour. 🙂
Example: 2 Pay period of 168 hours. All 168 are billable. Billing rate $100.
That is 100% utilization (which is nearly impossible), and an effective billing rate of $100 per scheduled hour. Pretty nice! But also pretty unrealistic.
When bidding for projects, you win some and you lose some. It’s like any sales process. Each project has it’s own percentage of win/loss.
Of course, that can be frustrating. You perform a bunch of research, develop a preliminary project plan, and then develop a project propsal, only to learn that somebody else go tthe job. Or worse, the propective client goes dark and you never hear from them again. They don’t come back and thank you for all your hard work in developing the plan and proposal. Instead, they just ignore you. They’ve obviously moved on, but don’t have the couirtesy to tell you.
That’s life. 🙁
But at least you have a nice project funnel to predict possible future revenue. And it works from that percentage of win/loss you enter into each project. Consider the following scenario:
Project A: Win percentage: 90%, $45,000
Project B: Win percentage: 75%, $80,000
A sales funnel says you about 82% chance of winning a deal, and the expected revenue is about $100K.
Of course two projects is not really enough. You should put a lot more projects into the funnel for the estimation to be accurate. The more projects in the hopper, the more likely the averages are to be real.
Check out this video too:
https://www.stdtime.com/videos/revenueforecast.htm
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! 🙂