When a department runs multiple projects, it is often difficult to track the time spent on each one. It is then difficult to work out how profitable or cost efficient a particular project has been, as you don't know how much time and therefore cost can be attributed to it.
In various places I have worked time recording systems are used. However, in my experience, however well intentioned people are, they forget to enter their hours, or do it several days later, when they've forgotten what they've done. Also because people flip between tasks, it is difficult to know how long they've worked on each one. Given this, how accurate are the many management reports that are created off the back of the time systems. Is the overhead of data entry and report creation justified?
I would argue that time recording systems are often a waste of time. Obviously if you are a lawyer and billing on an hourly rate I can understand the need for one, but if you are using the data to resource plan, work out sales prices or understand your departments productivity, I think it tends to be a impotent task.
I worked in one place where they attempted to predict accurately the number of hours they would work on a project using MS Project and then weekly tried to reconcile this against what was actually being used on their time sheets. The result was a long-winded waste of project manager's time. The time-sheet information was inaccurate and predicting durations to the hour is impossible without a crystal ball!
So given we still need to resource plan and work out how profitable and productive our projects are, what do we do? I think a better approach is to look at metrics for the department as a whole. To do this we need to be clear when projects are starting and ending. This is more difficult that it seems, some project drift in and out of existence, but good project management should tackle this effectively. You can then look at a range of department-wide statistics such as how many projects are currently running, what is the average duration of a project, average duration per pound of project revenue, number of simultaneous project over the number of people within the department.
There are a number of advantages to this holistic approach. The results can be published regularly to give the team a focus for improvement, it encourages teamwork, the data will be more accurate and it requires much less time overhead to produce the information.
What do you think? Stuck with time wasting time recording systems? Would this overall approach help you? Interested to hear your comments.
In various places I have worked time recording systems are used. However, in my experience, however well intentioned people are, they forget to enter their hours, or do it several days later, when they've forgotten what they've done. Also because people flip between tasks, it is difficult to know how long they've worked on each one. Given this, how accurate are the many management reports that are created off the back of the time systems. Is the overhead of data entry and report creation justified?
I would argue that time recording systems are often a waste of time. Obviously if you are a lawyer and billing on an hourly rate I can understand the need for one, but if you are using the data to resource plan, work out sales prices or understand your departments productivity, I think it tends to be a impotent task.
I worked in one place where they attempted to predict accurately the number of hours they would work on a project using MS Project and then weekly tried to reconcile this against what was actually being used on their time sheets. The result was a long-winded waste of project manager's time. The time-sheet information was inaccurate and predicting durations to the hour is impossible without a crystal ball!
So given we still need to resource plan and work out how profitable and productive our projects are, what do we do? I think a better approach is to look at metrics for the department as a whole. To do this we need to be clear when projects are starting and ending. This is more difficult that it seems, some project drift in and out of existence, but good project management should tackle this effectively. You can then look at a range of department-wide statistics such as how many projects are currently running, what is the average duration of a project, average duration per pound of project revenue, number of simultaneous project over the number of people within the department.
There are a number of advantages to this holistic approach. The results can be published regularly to give the team a focus for improvement, it encourages teamwork, the data will be more accurate and it requires much less time overhead to produce the information.
What do you think? Stuck with time wasting time recording systems? Would this overall approach help you? Interested to hear your comments.
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