A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Did you know there is a graphical timesheet in Standard Time®? There is! (In the Windows Edition, that is.) Just click the little gray icon at the top of the timesheet and choose ‘Daily Hours’. This mode displays time graphically on a daily schedule. Watch the video below to learn more.
The graphical mode lets you see each time entry as a colored block on the screen. You can easily spot overlapping time entries and correct them.
Can a timesheet make you happy? Maybe… if it truly makes your life easier… sure! This video will show you the many things available in the Standard Time® timesheet.
This timesheet has a lot to make you happy. That’s why it’s called the ‘Happy Timesheet’. 🙂
You may not be able to get a GPS signal but Google knows the best time tracking app. Or try these other social media sites;
There is a timesheet specially made for the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA). It’s Standard Time®; it has everything you need for your project.
And just to go above an beyond… this timesheet has support for Option Year contracts and contract MOD’s. What are they? Well… if you don’t know, then you probably don’t need them! Option Year contacts are a government thing. Each year you get a new contract that specifies the scope of the projects. It lists the manpower and rates the government will accept. You assign actual employees and countersign the contract. Then you own it. ST supports that whole process. But still… if you don’t use OY contacts, then it’s more than you need.
So maybe you just need a simple timesheet that is DCAA compliant.
ST has that too.
DCAA compliance is not hard. There are some simple rules you must follow. Do that, and you’re find. The link below shows how ST complies with DCAA regulations.
http://www.stdtime.com/dcaa.htm
Want more information. Try this DCAA compliance video.
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
I ran across a nice video of how to take baby steps to implementing time tracking within your organization. It’s worth watching. Follow the link below for the video.
The theory is that you can get immediate value from a time tracking product like Standard Time® with minimal input. And then after implementing the product, you can take several baby steps to gaining incremental value. It’s up to you when you reach the point of diminishing returns (when more employee participation yields less value). But this program has enough upward latitude to allow you to explore the upper limits of your company’s needs.
Follow the steps and see what you think!
There are no big problems; there are just a lot of little problems.
— Henry Ford
Henry Ford was the genius of the 20th Century assembly line. He almost singlehandedly designed the Model T and Model A Fords. Those two cars were the workhorses of the early 1900’s. So when Henry speaks of “little problems” he’s talking about inventing the entire automobile industry. But that’s big enough for anyone.
His point, though, is that in engineering you have dozens of little issues to deal with. And they stay with you indefinitely. In other words, engineering is a constant fight with little problems that you must work out with patience and perseverance. If you don’t have the aptitude, don’t get into engineering!
1. One of the biggest problems engineering people have is balancing quality with cost. Any engineer can tackle the myriad of little problems before them. But can they do it cost effectively? In other words, does it take forever to solve them, thus costing a fortune? Or can they resolve each one rapidly and without expensive solutions. The balance between polishing your work in a craftsmanship style, and pumping product after product out the door is a big, big problem that requires a lot of thought.
2. The next biggest problem engineers face is collateral damage from engineering fixes. I.e. bugs. Here’s an example: Say you are an electrical engineer designing a printed circuit board. And in your haste to produce a cost effective product, you forget a circuit trace. The manufacturing department is now forced to hand-wire that trace. It now costs your company much more in the long run. That’s a bug that must be retooled. Things like that happen in every engineering discipline. It’s definitely the next biggest problem you must face.
3. The final big problem engineers face is time estimates and project schedules. Engineers do not think like other human beings. They cannot estimate time with any degree of accuracy. And they do not like being interrogated about how long their work will take. You’ll just have to wait until it’s done, they’ll say. I’m working as fast as I can. Problem is, big money is riding on their engineering work. Sometimes the company just can’t wait. It the engineer that has to hurry up and product the product on the company’s timeline. And that can lead to big battles. So this is a fairly big problem facing engineering departments and company executives.
And then after those three, there are just a lot of little problems. 🙂
The CIO Insight article below explains that SMB’s are going to the cloud for simple apps like email and storage. And they are not necessarily asking IT for permission. I suppose that is because the cloud provider supplies all the support they need, and users feel they can get by without their own internal IT department. Probably so…
Inexpensive cloud solutions are getting more and more attractive. Not only do you get a great app, but you get external hosting and support. So instead of spending your in-house resources on server hosting, patches, backup, upgrades, and babysitting, you can spend it on your core competencies.
Another up-and-coming cloud app is timesheets – check out a product named Standard Time®. Their cloud-based timesheet is superb. And just like the simpler apps described above, all the support is handled by the vendor. But this is no simple app like storage or email. This thing is loaded! Check out some of the features you get for $13 a month!
Here are two videos on the Standard Time dynamic duo – Timesheet and Project Management
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Timesheet
Of course you would expect this. It’s a timesheet, after all! But the timesheet is extremely flexible and comprehensive. Employees only see projects assigned to them. Project tasks are included. Sub-projects and phases show a full hierarchical breakdown. There is an expense sheet, and time off tracking.
Project Management
In addition to the timesheet, Standard Time gives you project rollups. (Yes, this is all on the cloud! Pinch yourself!!!) They let you track actual work verses estimates. Track percent complete. Attach documents to tasks.
PTO Accruals
Need to track comp time for employees working over their scheduled hours? Got it. Need vacation tracking? Got it. How about automatic time off accruals on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. That’s in there too!
Expense Tracking
What would a consulting tool be without cloud-based expense tracking? It’s in there too. In fact, you can run a client invoice that contains all the timesheet hours plus expenses. Or, you can run a report that includes them both. Or separately. There are even custom reporting capabilities.
It’s a little hard to believe that cloud-based hosted services have evolved this far. I guess somebody’s been hard at work. Check out Standard Time if you’re a consulting firm, manufacturer, or government office. Here’s a link to their YouTube channel. New videos are posted all the time, so subscribing is a good itea.
If you’re a consulting or contracting company, the answer to that question is a no-brainer. Or so says the video below. In this video, the author asserts that consulting companies absolutely must use a timesheet for the job. I tend to agree. Consulting has become so complex, and the margins so slim that you can’t afford to lose a single hour of billable time.
Consultants regularly check their utilization rates to make sure they are making money. Utilization is the ration of billable to scheduled hours for the employee. For example, if the employee is scheduled for 40 hours and only works 35, then he is only 88% utilized. And because he hasn’t worked the full 40, he is not billing as many hours as possible. Therefore, his effective billing rate is lower than what the company actually charges for his work.
Here’s an example of a poor effective billing rate. Suppose a consultant bills at $100 per hour. But he only gets 10 hours per week of billable work. His effective billing rate is now only $25 per scheduled hour. And if you miss any of those hours, the rate goes down. So using a timesheet to collect and account for all the billable time is probably a no-brainer.
Manufacturing companies like to track project hours using a timesheet. It allows them to connect with their employees and see where their time is going. But it has more value than that. Manufacturers who track projects want to improve their deliverable schedules, milestone predictions, and task duration estimates. This obviously lends credibility to their project management efforts. The only way to get good project task estimates is to use a timesheet. They must collect actual employee hours so those hours can be compared with the original estimates.
And finally, even if you are not a services-based company that tracks time for client billing, and you are not a manufacturing company that tracks project management metrics, you may still just want to see employee status and weekly hours. That’s a good enough reason to use a timesheet. Simply keeping an eye on employee activities is a worthwhile management practice, even if you don’t have a hard reason to use a timesheet.
All these reasons are illustrated in a nice little YouTube video. Check out the ScoutwestInc channel for additional timesheet videos. Some of them make a lot of sense.
Trouble with poor task estimation? Introducing the three-point estimating technique. This might help.
Te = (To + 4Tm + Tp) / 6
Here’s the problem: engineers are never good at estimating task durations. Not even close. When asked how long their tasks will take, they usually just say, “They’ll be done when they’re done!” As a project manager, you have to coerce an estimate out of them. And then multiple by Pi for the real number. But there may be a better way. Read on for a possible solution.
Example:
It’ll take about two and a half months.
Multiple by Pi
Result: eight months
First off, Engineers just don’t like estimating time. They have technical issues to deal with, and are not practiced in the arts of time estimation. They feel uncomfortable in fuzzy areas like this because they don’t spend any time thinking about such things. The traffic in mathematical and logical conundrums, not project scheduling. You might just as well ask them how much their tasks will cost, or how much the company will make from the product, once marketed. It’s just not something they spend any time considering. That means you have to take their task estimates with a grain of salt, or perhaps with a more scientific calculation.
What could be more scientific than multiplying them by Pi? 🙂
The three-point estimate technique below first appeared with PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique). It has some merit when dealing with task durations, and might be more accurate than multiplying engineer estimates by some arbitrary number.
Start by taking this three-point estimate below from the engineer for each task. You must get them to tell you the most likely duration for each task, which they will understate by a longshot… then you must try for an optimistic estimate, which they will assert is the same as the first estimate… then finally you have to get them to spit out a pessimistic duration, at which point they will argue is also the same as the first two, and that you are stupid for asking… now go away! But if you can get these three numbers, you can plug them into the three-point estimate calculation below.
With these three estimates, you can run a calculation to find the mean estimate. (Find this calculation on page 150 of the PMBOK.)
Te = (To + 4Tm + Tp) / 6
Example: (4 + 4(6) + 12) / 6 = 8 months
The results are a good prediction of human estimations, assuming that most people under-judge the duration of most tasks. They simply forget or don’t consider all the possible details in executing their assigned tasks. This calculation makes up for that lack of detail.
Hope it works for you!
