HELP! I am a Project Administrator managing a med size project plan. Upper management is requesting very detailed reports from project.
My problem is that I do not have access to any time tracking tools, nor do I have the budget to buy any.
Is there a macro or an easier solution to collecting my team's time on the project at a task level?? Saving Changes...
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John SchlichterFounder| OPM Experts LLC http://opmexperts.comAtlanta, Ga, United States
The key to tracking (controling) a project is planning it correctly. Create a charter with clear objectives, a scope statement that defines what is in and out, work package descriptions that define each work package clearly in terms of results and effort and duration, a network diagram, and allocate resources. Account for the interests of stakeholders, and include risk management, quality assurance, and project managemnet workpackages. Baseline it. Establish a change control procedure. Then your tracking (and replanning) begins.
You can use MS Project or even Excel. There are only a few metrics that you need to track in order to determine the true status of your project and forecast schedule and budget performance. But as I said, effective tracking is predicated on effective planning. Conversely, garbage in, garbage out. Saving Changes...
Michael WoodProject Manager / Business Analyst / Business Process Improvement Guru| Independent ContractorGig Harbor, Wa, United States
Kelly, I have used some very simple techniques for tracking and monitoring the effort spent on a project and remaining effort to complete it. I use EXCEL to create my original project plan at the task level. The design of the sheet is set up to support Pivot Tables so analysis can be done quickly and easily. I have attached a template for you.
Each week a status report sheet is given to each person woking on the project. On the sheet is listed their tasks and columns for indicating how much time they spent this week and how much more time they expect to spend in order to complete each task assigned and estimated completion date. Using that data you can calculate their true progress with a few formulas. For example. If a task is budgeted at 30 hours and the time spent to date is 25 hours with 15 hours left to go then the total task is now estimated to take 40 hours and is 62% complete. If the task was to be completed in a 4 week window of time and it is week 3 then it is 62% complete with 75% of the time gone. With this data you can extrapolate the rate of progress and revise the budget and projected completion dates. In the example the task will most likely be completed in about 2 weeks; one week late.
Now, if you keep a spreadsheet of for each week for each task you can develop a trend line that allows you to factor in the estimating error rates over time and you can get very smart very quick on improving future estimates.
I know this might sound complicated but it really is quite easy. The tough part is entering everyones progress and estimates each week. However if each of the staff update their own time on a spreadsheet you can easily copy that data into a master for analysis.
Hi Lowell, Actually, the templete that Michael did not quite work for what I needed it to. I wound up classifying tasks into groups so that they could be filtered. I then recorded a macro in project and export it to excel where I run another macro to clean it up.
Building it took a while, but it was worth it. I can now create timesheets for 60 people based on the project plan in 5 minutes flat! Saving Changes...
Kelly,Michael e-mailed me that your improvements to his template would be much more likely to fit my needs. Would you please share it with me? Thanks Saving Changes...
