How to Benefit from Timesheet Management

Timesheet Management is all about shifting from efficiency to effectiveness! The sooner you are able to get your team to understand this well.

Historically, time tracking and timesheets have been looked at being invasive and induce a level of self-doubt within employees. This thought needs to be well handled and eliminated for a healthy work environment and building an inclusive culture.

Our teams must know and understand full well the overall business context and the fact that they stand to gain a lot rather than looking it as a micromanaging act.

Time logging has been practiced since the 19th century.

The overall concept is simple – be fully aware of how many hours did the employees work for to calculate their payroll. Back then it was merely looked at from an accounting, wage management and HR standpoint only.

But a lot has changed and changed for better.

We have come a long way from just cranking hours against activities to waking up to the concept of project management, productivity, efficiency and profitability.

It’s just not only about the money anymore. Rather it’s to do more with outcomes, achievements, business success and personal growth.

To that effect, let us win our mission to make our customers happy, our teams successful be on a steady growth path personally and professionally by being effective self-time managers!

17 “True” benefits of timesheet management

1. Cultivate a Habit – no one ever likes cataloguing their entire day. But then unless it’s done you don’t know how far you are from what you could have actually accomplished. Start with timing your daily tasks first.
2. Eliminate wasteful activities – Once you review the activities you have done over a week you exactly know which activities could have been avoided or traded for more meaningful tasks. That’s your first great win right there!
3. Better Task Planning and Prioritization – You know which tasks are more aligned to your goals for the day and week. Hence you plan your work week accordingly. Man with a plan!
4. Enables Collaboration – Having clarity on your as well as the team’s tasks + the added awareness of what is required to achieve the goal sets the stage for meaningful collaboration.
5. Take control of your day – Timesheets help you stick to your plan. This way you can put the low value tasks on the backburner and focus first on important tasks.
6. Identify your peak hours – With time tracking, you know what times are best suited for tasks that require focus and undivided attention. This is very important to deliver high value tasks consistently.
7. Improve your efficiency – unless you know if you are closing tasks in the expected time you cannot really improve. Efficiency is about doing more with less. Hence, you are able to identify growth opportunities for yourself and get better at your daily task management.
8. Become more effective – this is all about quality. When you are at high efficiency, your focus must be to be effective i.e. enabling business value. Closing 10 tasks in record time and ending up with rework is not exactly being effective. Do once, but with quality and in record time!
9. Capture reliable business data – timesheets allow you to make notes on the tasks you are working on. This can prove very helpful over time for quick reference. You also prevent losing out on critical learning’s or important aspects of the tasks you encountered during their execution.
10. Identify skill gaps and build them – with time tracking you will quickly identify tasks you are good at, tasks that take longer and tasks you are not able to do on your own. This is your growth opportunity. Identify what is required to overcome the task delays and build those skills to keep your projects on track.
11. Improve problem solving abilities – if there is a trend emerging for delays or roadblocks on specific tasks, you can get creative. Park those tasks, set problem solving sessions with the team and define the way forward. These way future roadblocks are prevented and task execution is improved.
12. Commit yourself – knowing full well where we stand w.r.t the project goals, our weekly plan, gap in expected progress fuels our commitment to the shared objective. The team is motivated to commit themselves further to contribute more.
13. Increase accountability – the overall project execution becomes transparent with timesheets. Hence, each one of us feels more accountable towards the assigned tasks and works to ensure the project or other team members’ work is not hampered.
14. Ability to handle unplanned requests – improved time management allows you to have some bandwidth to accommodate unplanned requests from your managers, customers or your team members.
15. See the big picture – project planning & estimation is often done based on past team performances. Thus you can see how your work and contribution can impact the overall project performance.
16. Contribute to the company’s bottom line – when you deliver quality work in less time you help improve project profitability & enable your company to take up more projects. As a result you grow individually and as a team.
17. Improve your work-life balance – this is by far the most common yet least realized benefit of effective time management.

To sum it up

Timesheet management is equally critical for project as well as our own success! It helps build a culture of

• Time bound execution & honoring timelines
• Being goals driven
• Continuous improvement
•  Commitment to shared objectives
• Increased personal responsibility and ownership
• Transparency across levels
• Open collaboration and communication

The market is flooded with online and virtual time tracking and time sheets. Pick one that is aligned to your business process and suits your team.

Whether it is excel based templates, just timesheet tools or a complete integrated project, time and resource management tool like Orangescrum – time tracking is a must.

Not only your teams become productive and your resource utilization goes up but end to end resource capacity planning also becomes robust.

As a result there is all round growth and optimization across teams and business functions.

Start benefiting from timesheet management today with a 14day free trial!

Why and How to Manage Multiple Projects

Running multiple projects simultaneously is a given. As project and portfolio managers we have to run multiple programs and projects to further the strategic vision of our company and customers alike.

Project Management becomes increasingly complex if the right approach and skills are not deployed at the right time.

And as a project or program manager you need to deploy a broad range of skills from leadership, business acumen, stakeholder expectation management, time & resource management, planning and strategizing, empathy, emotional intelligence to technical knowhow and understanding of the organization dynamics.

How can the above skills help us to manage multiple projects “

1.      Grow your experience and save more time:

By working on multiple projects you get to constantly learn new technology, work with new teams, improve domain knowledge and overall multitasking skills. 

2.      Organizations look for multi-project handlers:

Know full well that organizations want a jack of all trades who can shift gears as and when required. You should be able to run a whole program with multiple projects along with projects that have unique requirements.

Some projects will check your team management skills while others may test your domain knowledge or your adaptability to customer requirements.

 

Thus you need a very high emotional quotient to understand the needs of these varying teams, keep them motivated, improve productivity rates and tie them all to project profitability at the same time.

Look how successful business founders, co-founder, CEO are handling multiple initiatives like Jack Dorsey balancing Square and Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg is handling Facebook, Instagram and more.

In the Infographics, we have mentioned the project management strategies that will help to streamline your multiple projects.

 

 

Working on multiple projects at the same time requires more dedication and skills. A simple and effective project management software makes your work simpler and easier.

A tool like Orangescrum, that is designed to accommodate as many projects as possible. It's simple and intuitive UI allows it to be used even by people who are new to project management.

You can track all your projects, tasks, resources and their allocation, availability and utilization with Orangescrum giving you a 360 degrees view of your entire portfolio.

Start running multiple projects successfully with a 14day free trial today!

7 Qualities of An Effective Resource Management System

Resource Management Systems are your starting point to ensuring efficient resource allocation and optimizing utilization. Successful companies are always focused on achieving high customer engagement & satisfaction, technologically advanced products & services and increased profitability.

And resource management sits right at the core of these 3 priorities with human resource management being the key focus point.

Numerous resource management challenges lead companies to deploy integrated project and resource management system for holistic execution.

Project and resource managers’ #1 challenge is to ensure resource productivity and timely project delivery.

Having the right resources assigned to the project based on skills is most important. And an effective resource management system can help achieve that.

Let us take a quick look into the 7 key qualities and benefits that an effective resource management system would add to our organizations.

1. Centralized Resource Management

Having a clear view of all your resources is the first step towards making a resource plan. Without a system in place you wouldn’t have the required visibility for efficient resource allocation.

A centralized system will enable identifying resources by skill, resource availability and their utilization in one single view.

Now this serves well to take a look at your top priority projects and begin with resource allocation for maximum return on your resources.

In addition having an inbuilt leave management also enables in resource scheduling and forecasting which directly feed into your resource management plans.

2. Proactive Resource Conflict Management

We all know that highly skilled resources are always in high demand and in short supply. Each project manager would want a lion’s share of the best resources for his project.

This leads to allocation conflicts and becomes more territorial with inter-department issues if the organization doesn’t have a robust matrix culture.

Resource managers have a tough time addressing project manager needs across business functions.

Hence, it is important that resource allocation is done based on project priority. By priority, I mean not urgency but impact. Which project will fetch the maximum $$ or lead to a significant rise in market share, customer satisfaction or brand building.

Integrated project and resource management will help to iron out such issues proactively and ensure efficient resource allocation across the organization.

3. In-built Time Tracking

You cannot measure resource utilization without robust time tracking practices. And, the universal challenge is we all hate tracking our time. Why? That is a discussion for another time J

The key metric to track and improve resource utilization is the planned vs actual. And the second one being billable vs non-billable hours.

These 2 metrics help identify our resource productivity and project profitability.

Also, as project managers you know how your resources are performing w.r.t the project schedule.

Most project and resource management systems offer non-intrusive time tracking capabilities with automated timers, time entries, timesheets and approvals for improved time management.

Tracking spent hours also helps us to see how well are we aligned with the delivery deadlines as well as where are we spending most of our time.

Identifying and reducing time spent on non-billable activities is a must practice to improve our processes, increase resource productivity and scale our operations.

4. Task Categorization and Tracking

There are going to be 100s of activities within a project. Some are value add, some are necessary evils and some are of very little value.

Unless you are able to do proper task categorization you wouldn’t know your low value activities, followed by time spent on such tasks.

Once you have a proper view of your tasks, you are well placed to identify bottlenecks either due to skill, resource constraint or process bottlenecks.

Resolving these bottlenecks with permanent solution goes a long way in making your task management practices more robust.

Note, everything rolls back to resource productivity and profitability.

Hence, having a handle on how your team is spending their time and what is their utilization rate is must for project success.

Not only that, proper task categorization will need to better skill based resource mapping and allocation.

5. Project Prioritization and Resource Scheduling

As stated earlier, identifying high value projects linked to the company’s strategic vision will help you to prioritize your resources effectively.

Visibility of the overall project plans with go-live or launch dates followed by task breakdown and delivery schedule can highlight resource requirements at every stage of the project.

From thereon, focus on resource skill to task mapping for proper allocation.

Having a single view of project milestones, progress and resource utilization can help in proactive identification of resource needs.

This leads to breaking silos and enables a more collaborative matrixes resource sharing culture within the company. And more so with the rapid adoption of agile transformation efforts across companies globally.

Resource management and tracking is a continuous process and not a one-time activity. Hence constant monitoring of project progress, resource availability and allocation must be done periodically.

You will prevent last minute resource crunch and not end up booking contractors that will certainly hit your project profitability. Plus getting contractors is also a knowledge drain as an organization and the next time you need similar skills your search begins again.

Hence, proper resource forecasting will help you make robust hiring and training plans to boost your company’s capabilities and offerings.

6. Enable organization wide Collaboration

Collaboration is the life-blood of project planning and execution. Many things can go wrong if the teams aren’t able to collaborate meaningfully leading to execution chaos, delivery delays and misunderstanding of assigned tasks and goals.

Moreover, meeting in person to discuss resource needs or calling up for every other resource conflict is not a productive use of your time.

Collaborating seamlessly on a single platform can help prevent conflicts altogether. Project and resource managers can share their resource requirements or challenges in advance, discuss assignments and prioritize holistically.

This will save a lot of time, streamline the overall resource allocation process and eliminate scope of conflicts.

Secondly teams too can collaborate at the task level, request time for brainstorming and issue resolution from expert resources. Thus reducing non-billable activities and prevent reworks.

7. Comprehensive Reporting

Generating automated reports in real-time is a must for an effective resource management system.

Some of the most sought after out of the box reports include:

• Resource Utilization
• Resource Availability
• Resource Allocation
• Planned vs Actual hours
• Billable vs Non-billable hours
• Task Aging report
• Time spent by task type report
• Consolidated time sheet report by project and users
• Project Overview

First of all report generation doesn’t have to be manual and cumbersome. These systems come in handy in providing readymade reports in real time.

Reports serve as the basis for further deep-dive analysis to identify root causes leading to delivery delays, resource conflicts and low productivity rates.

Also, having certain metrics in place helps set the right goals w.r.t to resource utilization rates, resource planning etc. at an organizational level.

Conclusion

Integrated resource management tools offer comprehensive strategic and tactical benefits.

• Task & time tracking
• Real-time status monitoring
• Resource pool management
• Leave management
• Resource availability, allocation & utilization views & reports
• Central collaboration across departments and project teams
•  Help break silos
• Productivity tracking

Resource management systems are a great way to manage your most important assets – your resources and optimize their utilization and obtain maximum return on investment.

End of the day, the primary objective of a company is to deliver value to its customers through exceptional products and services. And resource planning tools are a major contributor to this objective. Start a free trial to Orangescrum and do efficient resource allocation.