Project Management

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Do you measure project manager's utilisation accurately ? If yes, how?

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Lakshmi Kant Shukla Senior Project Manager| BT Global Business Services Pvt Ltd Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India
We have numbers of project managers working on big programs or if you are PM team manager , do you have any mechanism to calculate utilisation of project manager scientifically?
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Luis Branco CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Dear Lakshmi
Interesting your question
Thanks for sharing

In order to give you my opinion, I would like to better understand what you mean by: "Do you measure project manager's use accurately? If yes, how?"
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Lakshmi Kant Shukla Senior Project Manager| BT Global Business Services Pvt Ltd Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India
Thanks Luis !

Let me explain my query better.

Any project manager working on a project, how they represent his time utilisation on that project accurately?
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Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina
Yes. In my actual work place project and program managers have to enter time sheets every week. My actual work place use TBM (Technology Business Management) as the basement to calculare costs and resources utilization related to technology and others fields.
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Thomas Walenta Global Project Economy Expert Hackenheim, Germany
Lakshmi

if there is a WBS element planned for project management, actual cost should be claimed against it (including overtime).
Only this way the organization can learn how much PM effort should be estimated for future projects.

Project managers should refrain from putting in less hours than they actually spent because the budget forecast becomes tight.
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Eduard Hernandez
Community Champion
Product Operations Program Manager Barcelona, Cataluña, Spain
We use time writing within project online. A breakdown of hours spent in projects, overhead or other non project related activities can be easily retrieved using the suitable query.
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Start with WHY...

What value do you hope to derive from this?

Remember that maximizing utilization is not the same as maximizing value...
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Joy Iyer Business Leader in the Hydrocarbons Sector, Engineering Manager, Project Manager| Paton Engineers and Constructors Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Not intending to hijack this discussion, but I would be interested in learning from community about any tools or processes utilized by organizations for early signs of overutilization/overburdening of PMs in terms of workloads and taking corrective action.

Timesheets etc. are good for billing and ensuring attendance, but I have often come across PMs who are putting in a lot of unaccounted extra effort to manage their portfolio, only for them to suffer on the wellness front.
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Lakshmi Kant Shukla Senior Project Manager| BT Global Business Services Pvt Ltd Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India
Thanks all for input !

In fact , filling time sheet does not effectively quantify actual effective utilisation of PM.
I agree with Thomas Walenta's view of calculating PM efforts based on WBS elements.Unfortunately .. it provides estimated PM efforts but does not provide clear view of PM's actual productivity in large projects / multiple PM's environment.
Our intent of putting this query is to define actual productivity measures of PM not estimated one.
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Peter Rapin Subject Matter Expect; Project Delivery| Independent Consultant Ontario, Canada
I am of the opinion that you can't measure a project manager's productivity - how many people did you talk to? How many words did you type? How many words did you read? How many problems did you identify? How many problems did you resolve?
All you can measure are results, the primary result being an acceptable final deliverable although intermediate deliverables can also be identified.
If the need is driven by client billing then you have to set up very broad categories, even then there is a certain level of creativity on the part of the PM.
I know of a large company that tried to measure a software coder's productivity matching time sheets to lines of code. Motivation became volume versus effectiveness. Same as for managers, you don't want noise you want value.
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Abolfazl Yousefi Darestani Manager, Quality and Continuous Improvement| Hörmann-TNR Industrial Doors Newmarket, Ontario, Canada
I agree with Sergio

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