I work for a product development company, where there is no timesheet system. As such, there is no data available to track the resource utilisation on particular tasks and hence it is very difficult to monitor the project progress. Tracking the cost is also a major issue.
Does anyone have an idea on how to track the project in such cases?
Saving Changes...
Sort By:
Josh NankivelEngineering Project Manager| AppleSioux Falls, Sd, United States
Check out dotproject here. It's open source, and has some abilities around timekeeping built in. I'm sure you could probably use just the timekeeping feature if you don't want to utilize all the tools available. Saving Changes...
Aditya ChinniSr Project Manager| JELDWENKlamath Falls, Or, United States
It is not surprising to hear this story. It is a problem of many startup companies. Such kind of organizational cultures are known as solo performing organizations. Those organizations will be successful only based on top performers and those performers have the project plans in their mind, and there is no support from the company. Even a simple mistake is enough to ruin most brilliant ideas. This was most common story of many startups during dot.com burst. Project management is such a valuable knowledge and practice which can protect the investments.
Normally tasks can be monitored in 2 ways. Effort wise and duration wise. Timesheets help to monitor tasks effort wise and automate the monitoring. As that system is not in place in this particular case, only duration tracking might help and manual effort is required. Start with Excel sheets, list all your deliverables and estimated duration. Impose weekly reports, based on weekly reports calculate work progress and can convert that one to cost calculation. This is one possible solution. I know I was not elaborate, but hope you can follow this hint, if you further need help please reply back to this post.
I agree with the post of Aditya. You can start with excel sheets to maintain effort and duration but, you may face some resistance from your team in filling up the "cumbersome" tracking sheets. Before we implemented automated PM tools in our organization, I was faced with this "laziness" problem too. I did have to go that extra mile in physically finding out from each team member the amount of time spent by them on their tasks and filling in the excel sheets myself!!! However, I kept advertising this fact to them, and those who felt guilty of not being able to justify their jobs in detail, started filling in the sheets, and the others fell in line quickly enough. We now have an automated system to enter the tasks, the estimated effort and the actual effort, and more importantly, we have a process in place that makes everyone enter the details accurately. I think what is more important is to put a process in place for people to justify the time spent on their jobs. This will automatically give you the efforts spent on the projects. Please do reply to this post if you need more explanation or any more help.
Thanks Saving Changes...
Aditya ChinniSr Project Manager| JELDWENKlamath Falls, Or, United States
Thanks Mahesh, and thanks for sharing your real situation and you are real project manager. One of PMI-isms is to act upon things and put personal effort instead of waiting for something to happen in the background. You did a great job fixing things around
In your case, weighted milestones may be another solution worth considering. Using significant points of product development, a weight (percentage complete) is assigned to the achievement of a significant point (milestone). Using a software development example, we can use the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) phases as our ‘significant points of product development’. For example:
In this example, the software product will have ‘earned’ 20% of its value when the Requirements are done. If the total cost of development of the software product is estimated to be $100,000, then the software product will have ‘earned’ a value of $20,000. It will not earn any more value until the Design is complete.
If weighted milestones are going to be used, then considerable thought needs to go into determining the appropriate milestones and what weight should be given to them.
IMHO, weighted milestones are OK to use for reporting purposes, but are not of sufficient accuracy to determine project health and do trending analysis and forecasting. If the work involved spans more than 1 reporting period (i.e. if our reporting cycle is monthly, and Design will take more than 1 month to complete), then project progress will be reported as being less than what is actually happening. Progress will appear to be ‘languishing’ at 20%, the same as it was last month, when in fact a great deal of work may have been successfully accomplished. Saving Changes...
Dirk KittredgeProject Manager| Marex GroupCentennial, Co, United States
Our company has been going through growing pains too. We've expanded by almost 100% over the past 12 months. We recently put an Excel based timesheet system into place that involves macro updating. We have an Access db that contains all active projects. The XL spreadsheet updates dropdown boxes so that you can allocate your time against the active projects or limited other categories, like "admin" or "office maintenance." There is a secondary dropdown field with values such as Email, Meeting, Development, Documentation, Research, Other, etc. to further define categories of work. Last, there's a comment field to write a couple of words about what you were actually doing. We put code in to automatically timestamp start/finish fields, so a simple Ctrl-T places the current date/time to reduce manual effort. We stressed to everyone that they are not going to be held to "40 hours or else" in this exercise. Rather, it's to know where our resources are going and help accurately bill our clients. Each week one does a key-combo which uploads last week's time sheet to a folder on the server for each person. We built a utility to read these files and aggregate the data in various ways so that we can see where our time is going. We encountered resistance at first, but we're conditioned like dogs now... pant, pant, pant! Saving Changes...
Josh - it is axiomatic in PM to use the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid)- words I live by. If you need to know how much effort has been expended - ask. The people creating the deliverables should be able to tell you something like - "I spent 15 hours this week on X deliverable and 4 hours on Y". If they can't tell you, consider replacing the staff!!
Spreadsheets and applications to track time were developed so that the team can concentrate on issues. If you need them, use them. Hold the team accountable for their time spent. Let them know if you will use a more rigid system (read formal here) if they can't volunteer their hours spent.
If you need to know how much money has been expended - blend the hourly rate for the team (like $55/hr), and track the expense by doing earned value analysis - time=money so if you know how much time is expended, you will know how much money has been spent, and how much remains.
The math is pretty straight forward - estimated hours per deliverable added up is your est. budget at completion. Negative time variance - over budget, positive - under... no hard stuff.... If you want to automate it - use a spreadsheet but ultimately - hold the team accountable for their time spent, and let them know you will be asking. Don't be surprised when you can't seem to close the last 10% on some deliverables..... "I'm 90% complete on that... should be able to finish by next week..." If you're hearing that- figure out if the task is on the critical path or the function can be cut.... because it probably won't finish before the end of the project.... Saving Changes...
