The Money Files

It wasn’t that long ago that I gave a webinar on managing money on projects, but it is taking a long time to answer all the questions that I didn’t get round to doing during the live session.  Thanks to all the fabulous participants, who asked such brilliant questions!  I am still trawling through them hoping to answer them all, and here is today’s batch of managing money Q&A.  They are all about timesheets and time tracking today.

If not via timesheets, how do you gather information on time spent on individual work packages?

I think timesheets are the only viable option to gather information on time spent on individual work packages.  The alternative is not recording time at all.  This is possible with fixed date projects where you have high commitment to work towards fixed milestones, but it doesn’t give you any data to use for forecasting in the future.

Without timesheets, how can you develop historic figures for future planning?

As I said above, you can’t.  Guessing might work, but I don’t recommend it!

I found that subject matter experts are more willing to devote time on projects if they can charge time to it.

I expect this is true in companies where charging is part of the culture and reward structure.  Other companies reward people on their contributions, team work, collaboration and so on, where being able to cross-charge for time spent is not as important.  It can even vary by departments within an organization.  I think the best thing to do is find out what works within your organization and do what you need to do in order to get the commitment required from the relevant people.

If you don't use timesheets how do you track actual hours against budgets?

You can’t.  But if you aren’t charging for your resources, you don’t always need to.  Salaried staff, seconded to a project for a fixed duration can work 3 hours a day or 13 hours a day and they cost the same.  A project resource who charges your hourly for his or her time could spend an hour being not very productive, or an hour being productive, and they cost the same.  Good management practices will mean you can monitor their workload and get the best out of both salaried and chargeable resources.  Whether or not this is important to you depends on whether you need to cross-charge other departments for effort spent, or whether they will be charging you.

Are timesheets used for other resources (non-PM resources)?  How do you capture PM time?

If you need to know how many hours someone is working on your project, or on individual tasks, then you need them to do timesheets.  So ask them to!  You can capture project management time in exactly the same way as you capture any other time.  Here are some sample timesheet entries for project management activity:

• Planning
• Risk, Issue, Changes and Dependency Management
• Project meetings (e.g. steering group, Project Board, team meetings, producing minutes)
• Team management (1:1s with project team members etc)
• Financial management (ordering, budgeting, forecasting)

You could have a big bucket task called ‘project management’ but I expect you would get more use out of the data if you broke it down further.

How do you convince everyone on the team to record their time accurately?  Especially when working multiple projects?  If they document them throughout the day, it’s easy, but is it practical?

This is the perennial problem with time recording.  I think the best approach is to make it as easy as possible for the people who have to record their time.  I saw a little desktop widget recently that times you and updates your timesheets automatically.  You just have to click when you start a task and click when you are done.  You can’t make it easier than that!  

You also have to fight against the urge for people to put in more hours than they have actually worked in order to ‘look good’.  Presenteeism is a problem in many offices, and this should be discouraged.  How about sharing your personal timesheets with the team so they can see you setting a good example of how it should be done?  What tips do other people have for getting time recorded accurately?


You can see the whole presentation online here, via a recording of the webinar.  Read the previous instalment of Q&A here.  I’ll have some more Q&A for you soon!
 

Do you need to work effectively when you're not face to face?  Project teams are often made up of people who don’t work in the same office.  Travelling around for meetings is expensive, so project managers can cut costs by working virtually – for example, using conference calls and online meeting tools to make the most of virtual meetings.

You can learn how to do this better (and save your project budget) by joining The Virtual Working Summit, which runs from 28 June through to 9 July 2010.  

Managing a virtual team is a key challenge for many project managers these days so I'm delighted to join a group of experts in the first ever Virtual Working Summit. It consists of short, practical interviews over ten days this summer and is hosted by Dr Penny Pullan. You can join wherever you are, by phone or web.

Here are some of the topics that the Summit will cover:
•    Building Trust Remotely
•    Navigating Across Cross-Cultural Tripwires
•    Tools for Successful Virtual Working
•    Communication on global projects
•    Sustainability and Virtual Working
•    Negotiating Internationally
•    Social Media and Virtual Teams (this one is my presentation)
•    Conference Calls Made Easy

The Summit is free, and the first of its kind.  It will give you access to leading thinkers and practical tips to make you even more effective at working virtually – which has to be useful for project and program managers looking to be more efficient.

You can register online any time from now.  If you can’t make it to any or all of the presentations, Penny is recording the proceedings and they’ll be available to buy on CD, so you can listen to what you missed at your leisure.
 

The Journal of Consumer Affairs has just published a study that says 27% of people aged 23 to 28 can answer basic financial questions.

The research was headed by Dr. Annamaria Lusardi, the Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  It gives some reasons why so few young people are financially literate including the fact that financial literacy is largely influenced by parental education levels and financial habits.

Young people who are financially literate are more likely to:

• have college educated parents (in particular, college educated mothers)
• have parents who were investors in stocks and retirement savings while they were aged 12 to 17
• have had high school teachers interested in students
• have peers who planned to go to college.

According to the study in the Summer 2010 issue, a college-educated young male whose parents had stocks and retirement savings when the respondent was a teenager was about 45% percent more likely to know about risk diversification than a female with less than a high school education, whose parents were not wealthy.  Young women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and those with low educational attainment scored lower than other groups.  The results of this research support the US Treasury-backed findings of the Financial Capability Survey which were released at the end of last year.

When you are recruiting project managers, you can’t ask questions about a candidate’s parents and their personal financial situation.  However, you could get candidates to do a simple numeracy test, or set them a project finance case study to work on, as part of the recruitment process.

Lusardi, who is the author of Overcoming the Saving Slump analysed financial literacy questions based on knowledge of simple concepts, such as the capacity to do a two-percent calculation, and the workings of inflation and risk diversification.  While one of the aims of the study appears to be to highlight the fact that schools don’t teach literacy, it flags up that young adults entering the workforce may not be as clued up with numbers as you might think.

“If we do not address financial illiteracy among young people through high school literacy classes, we will fail to equip young people with the tools they need to make financial decisions, and we may pay the cost down the road,” Lusardi says.  That could be on your project, if it’s managed by someone who doesn’t have the basic numeracy to ask the right questions.  “Not everybody has an opportunity to learn from their parents or their friends. Young people at the start of their career, or who are in the process of buying their first home need to be financially knowledgeable before they engage in financial contracts.”

Of course, not everyone who will pitch up for a job is financially illiterate, and not all of your young project management employees will need extra help with juggling the finances on a project.  But it doesn’t hurt to ask – as experienced project managers, coaches and mentors we should be looking out for people who might need a helping hand with project financials, and providing it.  Not only could you end up with someone who is skilled at managing maths at work, you could also be equipping someone get to better handle their personal finances.

Find the article online: "Financial Literacy Among the Young.” Annamaria Lusardi, et. al. Journal of Consumer Affairs; Published Online: June 1, 2010 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-6606.2010.01173.x).

“Digite does not have extensive financial capabilities,” says Abhinav Praneet, Senior Solution Specialist at Digité Inc.  “You have the basic functionalities for basic project management functions.”

Fair enough.  Digite is a collaboration tool in the Application Lifecycle Management arena, not a financial management tool, but from what I have seen there is more than enough financial functionality to suit the average project manager.  

The product does have enough financial functionality to manage a project successfully, but it does take a bit of effort to set up.  You need to set up account heads such as the ones shown in the screenshot below i.e. the central points for aggregating figures under the head of income or expense when you start defining your budgets.  These could be ‘fixed asset cost’ or ‘budget consumable cost’.  

You can also create financial templates. “You can set up these to define a skeleton of how you would capture your budgets, and estimates,” says Praneet.  Then each time you start a new project you can just call up a template and use that as the basis for entering financial data.  You can create an estimate and then make it your project budget with pretty much just a click.  If you don’t bother to estimate beforehand you can create a budget from scratch.  Digite also allows you to reforecast and have different version of the budget, just in case it changes in the future. You just inactivate the budget, change it and reactivate it – and that version becomes the latest version.

The most important part of the template is the worksheet. “This defines the line items that form the budget items in the project budget,” Praneet explains.  “You can capture all the line items that you are budgeting for on your project.”   One of the lines in the sample data he shows me is ‘books and library materials’ and it reminds me of a conversation with someone on Twitter recently about how we would love to have a budget for buying books at work.

There is a lot of set up required with Digite, but you only have to do it once.  For a tool that prides itself on minimising the amount of data entry users have to do, I think there is a lot of data entry.  But again, you only have to do a lot of it once.  If you are the system administrator, there is a fair amount of effort involved in getting the software configured correctly to make life easier for everyone else.  As with any tool, the data out is only as good as the data put in, so you want to make it as easy as possible for the end user, even if the administrator does have a bit of a job when they first install it.

“Doing it in Digite is better because you can track against actuals,” says Praneet.  “If you do it in Excel you can’t compare.”  Digite allows you to see how you are faring in terms of what you have budgeted for.

The software also allows you to input salaries so that you can track how much your project resource costs.  You can capture transactions and chargebacks, and create invoices for clients based on billable hours and operational expenses for any given period.  

There is a reporting function which will churn out a financial summary, expense report and even some basic earned value analysis graphs (for example, those below) which draw from the integrated timesheet data, all of which are perfectly suitable for the majority of projects.  

Digite might not look the slickest tool on the market, and it seems to involve a fair amount of set up, but once it is operational it looks as if it will meet the needs of most project managers.