Top 10 Timesheet Tips

Some project managers find it hard to get their teams to complete timesheets. It doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, completing your timesheet can be a quick job if you do it regularly and use an online system like TimExPro that makes it easy for you. Here are our top 10 timesheet tips in case you are struggling to get accurate time data from your team.

1. Include Vacations

Make sure there is somewhere on the project timesheet for team members to book their vacation time to. If they are on the beach or taking photos of a new city they won’t be working on your project, so make it easy for them to record this absence as holiday. Encourage them to complete their holiday timesheet time in advance as this will also help you understand when they are available for project tasks.

2. Include National Holidays

You wouldn’t schedule any project work to happen

on a national holiday (unless that was required by the project schedule) so make sure that team members have the opportunity to book hours to ‘national holidays’ as a task so that they aren’t booking time to your project when they were at home or away for the weekend.

If you can, pre-populate the timesheet templates with this already completed for the relevant days, as this will save your project team members a job.

3. Include Non-Productive Time

Project team members might book 8 hours a day to your project, but in reality they don’t spend 8 hours a day working on it. They take calls about other projects, they drink coffee, they talk to a colleague they haven’t seen for a while. Make sure that they can book the appropriate amount of time to other projects or to ‘non-productive time’ and let them know that you expect a certain proportion of time to be accounted for in this way.

4. Do Them Regularly

Do you remember what you were doing two weeks ago? Probably not – projects are so fast-moving and things change all the time, so it’s hard to recall what happened earlier this week, let alone earlier this month. Doing your timesheets regularly is the only way to gather accurate information when it is fresh in your mind.

You should complete your timesheets at least once a week, and make sure your team members do this too. Chase anyone who doesn’t complete them on time, but don’t leave it until last thing on a Friday afternoon when everyone is keen to get home for the weekend. The risk then is that they’ll rush the exercise and book time to any activity instead of the correct ones.

5. Set A Good Example

If you don’t complete your timesheets accurately and on

 time, how do you expect your team members to? And if they hear you complaining about how hard it is to fill them in or what a waste of time it is, they will take their cues from you. You set the tone and the culture for the project team, so it is important to lead by example.

Put a regular task in your diary so that you don’t forget. Be positive about your use of timesheets and your compliance with the policy, and make everyone else on the team feel that it is a normal, productive part of being on a project.

6. Explain How The Data Is Used

People often worry about why you want to know exactly what they are doing every day. In difficult economic climates, or companies that are going through redundancy programs, employees might be worried that the data will be used against them somehow.

Tell your team what you are using the data for – validating project estimates, checking schedule progress and ensuring that the project is progressing according to plan. They shouldn’t be worried about the data being used for anything else. If you think it will help and you can genuinely do this, tell them that it won’t be shared with anyone outside of the team.

7. Make It Easy To Add New Tasks

Projects, by their nature, involve change. There might be a change to scope or an issue that requires new, unplanned work. Make sure that project team members can easily add this new work to their timesheets. This ensures the integrity of the data and gives them the chance to complete it accurately instead of booking it to another, inaccurate task.

Of course, you don’t want your project timesheets to include hundreds of tasks, but if a new task is worthy of being a timesheet item, make the process to add it or request it as easy as possible.

8. Include Sickness Absence

Unfortunately, team members get sick, so

 make sure that there is a line they can use to record any time out of the office due to sickness absence. There should also be lines for other absences, such as paternity leave or jury service.

9. Do Them Online

If you make your timesheets available online, no one will have an excuse for not completing them! Online timesheets are accessible from everywhere, even from home if you have forgotten to complete them before leaving the office.

10. Use Reporting

Reports can show you who has not yet completed their timesheets this week. You can then chase them up, instead of sending an email to everyone on the team when some of them will have already done their submissions.

You can also use timesheet report data to validate your estimates and review your project plan information. Check that you are on schedule by making sure that the hours spent on a task broadly add up to what you had forecasted. If they don’t, you’ll need to make changes to your schedule accordingly. Many online project timesheet applications have a built-in suite of reports that you can use or tailor to your needs.

Doing timesheets doesn’t have to be an administrative overhead. If you set a good example and take the worry out of completing the data, team members will soon have confidence in the process and make time each week to enter accurate data. In turn, that will give you the information you need to manage the project effectively and successfully.

Use the professional timesheet features of TimExPro to manage the time spent on your project. Your team members can access their timesheets from anywhere and you’ll always have a real-time view of project progress.

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Effective Status Meetings

Status meetings are a good way to maintain effective communication on a project. There are some simple rules and etiquettes that will make them more production and valuable to the attendees.

1. All individual meetings should have an agenda that describes the major aspects of the meeting and the timeframes. Regularly scheduled, ongoing status meetings do not need a published agenda every week if they stick to the same agenda format. Instead they use a "standing agenda" which is understood to be the same for each meeting.
2. Someone should document the key points of the meeting. This will be the facilitator or originator unless other arrangements have been made. This person is sometimes called a “scribe”. The scribe should recap all outstanding action items, including who is responsible, what is expected, and when the action item is due.
3. There should be a meeting facilitator. This is usually the project manager unless other arrangements have been made.
4. Make sure the participants know ahead of time of anything they need to bring to the meeting or any advance preparation that needs to take place.
5. Only invite the people that need to be there. Others may dilute the effectiveness of the meeting.
6. The meeting should start on time, with some allowance for those that may be coming from another meeting.
7. The person who requested the meeting should explain the purpose and the expected outcome.
8. The facilitator needs to follow the agenda and watch the time to make sure everything gets covered.
9. Take any lengthy discussions offline or to a separate meeting that focuses on these items with the people that are most interested.
10. The scribe or facilitator should recap the notes and any decisions that were made and send them to attendees and other appropriate stakeholders.

Is There Too Much Problem Solving?

There can be a temptation to engage in problem solving when you have all the key people together at one time. However, the concern about problem solving is that usually only a few people are engaged in any one problem, while everyone else is unengaged and wasting time. While you have everyone together, use the time to discuss general status, issues, scope and risk. Only use problem solving if the problems are of interest to most of the team members. 

Long meetings are usually the result of too much problem solving. If you find that problem solving is extending the meeting, try to reduce the time allocated to the meeting. For instance, if you meet for two hours per week and find you are engaging in problem solving try reducing the time of the meetings to 90 or 60 minutes. Keep the status meetings short with a tight agenda to be most effective.

Source:Tenstep

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How to Deal with Uncertainty on Long Projects

Many long projects start off with a lot of uncertainty. You may not be 100% sure of the resource requirements, the final deliverables, the cost, schedule, etc. There may be many risks. The good news is that project managers deal with the uncertainty associated with large projects all the time, and it is very likely that you can be successful. Here are a couple tips to consider, depending on what you think will work best in your situation.

1. Break the work into smaller pieces
   The first thing to do with a long project is to break it down into smaller pieces if possible. Although you may be unclear about the work to be done in the next year, you should at least know what you will need to do over the next few months. Instead of defining a two year project, for example, start by defining a project that will cover only the first phase. After that project, you can redefine and estimate the next major phase as a separate project. You will also be able to more easily plan and manage each of the shorter projects.
2. Plan at a higher level as the planning horizon gets further out
   Many organizations will not allow you to break a large project into a set of smaller ones. Many companies only want to pay for one project, and track one project. 
   The next idea is to estimate and plan the work for the entire timeframe, but plan at a higher-level the further out in the future you get. You should have a firm and detailed workplan for the next three months, but then the planning will be at a higher and higher level. You have a framework for completing the project, but only the short-term activities are planned out in detail. This is probably the approach most project managers take on long projects.
3. Use multiple estimating techniques
   The classic estimating technique is to build a work breakdown structure, estimate the work associates with the lowest level activities and then add everything back up for the final overall estimate. This approach does not work well when you are not sure exactly what the work is a long way into the future. Fortunately, there are other estimating techniques that will help you cross-check your estimated effort, cost and duration.
   • Rely on outside experts to review your Charter and schedule to see if they think your estimates are reasonable.
   • See whether there have been similar projects in your company where you can review the prior schedule and estimates to see how they line up with your project.
   • Create a parametric estimate based on some type of reasonable model.
   It is best if you can use multiple estimating techniques to increase the accuracy of your final estimates.
4. Apply rigorous risk management 
   
   
   We have already discussed some ways to deal with the uncertainty of schedule and effort estimating risks. There will be many other risks as well. All of the risks need to be identified, and then a specific plan can be put into place to respond to the risks. Every month, you update the risk plan to ensure known risks are being managed and new risks are identified.

Summary

You are right to be concerned about the unknowns associated with long projects. However, there are a number of techniques that can be used to make you feel more comfortable. These means you have applied your best thinking to plan the project out as best you can, and then rely on good communication processes, risk management and schedule management to discover the detailed nature of the project as you progress.

Source:Tenstep

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Handle Scope Change Requests with Appropriate Discipline

When a project begins, you must gain agreement with your sponsor on project scope. The scope is defined at a high-level in the Project Charter or Project Scope Statement. At a low-level, the scope is detailed through the approval of the business requirements. Once these two documents are approved, you have enough information to understand scope through the remainder of the project.

However, like death and taxes, change is inevitable. There are two reasons. First, it is almost impossible to define ahead of time exactly what the final solution should look like, and so the requirements may change as the solution starts to evolve. Second, overall business conditions change over time. Some of this business change will force changes to the project scope in ways that are not known ahead of time.

So, what do you say when the inevitable changes start to come in? If you say yes without understanding the consequences to the project, you increase your chance of failure. If you say no, you may introduce conflict with the client and run the risk of delivering a solution that does not meet the client’s needs.

The key to scope change management is to not say "yes" or "no". The better response is to follow a scope change management process. This process should include:

• Understanding the business value of making the change
• Estimating the impact on the project budget and schedule
• Taking the information to the project sponsor (or their designate) for an approval decision.

Scope change management is really the process of letting the sponsor make the decisions - once they understand all the facts and implications.

You should establish scope change procedures based on the size of the project. For small projects (maybe less than 250 effort hours) you don’t need to worry about scope change as much. The project will likely start and end before the business can change much, and most of the requirements are probably fairly well known. The project manager can quickly evaluate a small change request and work with the sponsor to determine if it should be accommodated.

For larger projects, scope change is a big deal, and must be managed accordingly. The entire team, including the sponsor, must be sensitized to understand when a scope change request is made. The scope change request process may have a number of steps and require a template or two. If the sponsor approves the change, the budget and timeline are changed accordingly. If the change is not approved, it is noted as such and the project continues on its way. You might be surprised how often the sponsor does not approve the scope change, once they understand the impact to the project.

Summary

Many project managers do a poor job of managing scope because they don’t want to offend the client. However, that should not be a part of the scenario at all. Instead, the project manager’s job is to make sure the scope change management process runs effectively, and that the project sponsor has the information they need to make the best decision possible on whether the scope change should be accepted.

Source:Tenstep

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