Apart from improving accounting and billing, accurate time records, and clearer vision of how and how much time employees spend on different tasks, project timesheet software may become a tool for controlling company’s efficiency. The data that is gathered by project timesheets may become a base for analyzing efficiency and creating a plan of improvement. Here are some steps for those starting from scratch:

Select and implement project timesheet software that will meet your requirements. This is the first step that sounds quite simple, however requires some time and effort. Because you need to make sure the chosen software will provide you with the information you need. Find out time tracking possibilities of the software, such as weekly or daily time reporting, possibility for project managers to approve or disapprove time reported by employees, etc.

Define a monitoring period for tracking employees’ efficiency. Let’s say, during a month period you check how much time employees spend on different tasks, find out how much time is spent not directly on work, but on other activities.

Now, when analyzing the data delivered by project timesheet software, you’ll probably notice that some of your workers use their time efficiently. So, select them to be so called efficiency leaders. Then, divide others on several groups, according to the level of their work efficiency, and appoint a leader to each group. Thus, the leaders may help the employees in their groups to better arrange their working time in order to avoid overtimes and inefficient use of time. Here again project time sheet software may be of great help, as well, because each employee may track their personal improvement in using their working time.

Set the goals to each group, and set another monitoring period. So, in a moth or two, check whether those goals were achieved.

Well, this was, actually, an example of how you may use project timesheet software to control and improve employees work efficiency. However, the main idea is clear, apart from accounting accuracy, wise use of project timesheet software may bring improvement to company’s work efficiency.

Hi!

Look, what I’ve been thinking about lately. You know, I think that though it’s great to use timesheets or a task time tracker, it’s also great to arrange your working time and to have some time tracking methods to make turn the use of a task time tracker from everyday struggle to a part of working process. So I’ve concentrated on finding recommendations or tips, or something that could help. Here’s a couple of them:

Remember that friend of mine, a .NET developer? His pet peeve was the inability to concentrate when there’s a need to track time after each task done.

So here comes the first recommendation that I think to be very useful. It is grouping everyday tasks by type of work. Well, that makes sense, because you can work uninterrupted on similar tasks and enter your records into task time tracker when they are fulfilled.

You know, some task time trackers include timers, and while it may seem tiring and distracting in the beginning, making it a habit to start and stop timers when you start or finish working on a task, will turn this duty into a natural part of working process.

Frankly, both of those recommendations require some initial effort from your side, such as grouping tasks and make yourself click those timers; however with a bit of practice this will come unnoticed. I’ll be looking for more tips, and maybe I’ll stumble upon a recommendation on how to make a task time tracker do everything itself with no help from your side, and make you coffee as a bonus. Stay tuned =)

Hi!

Recently, I had a nice talk with a friend of mine whom I haven’t seen for a couple of month. He’s a .NET developer, and has been very busy lately with several projects. So, we haven’t seen each other for quite a long time, and the first thing he did after saying hello to me, he started complaining about project time tracking. Not kidding! He started with not my beautiful eyes, or the way I looked, but the way he has to track the time he spends on projects.

The thing is, that the company he works at has recently changed the project time tracking system, so instead of weekly reports developers have to report their time spent on different tasks daily. So, a friend of mine was furious about it, saying that each day he had to enter his spent time into the timesheet, and this distracted him, he couldn’t concentrate blah-blah-blah… In other words, he was upset.

I, however, am convinced that project time tracking with a possibility to track time daily is much more convenient than weekly timesheets. Here’s why.

With weekly project time tracking you have to painfully recollect how much time exactly was spent on this or that task, or rather marking the time daily somewhere in a notepad in order to have exact numbers by the end of the week. And bear in mind, that accuracy is needed for right accounting and billing, and many other things. Though weekly time tracking seems easier to use, it’s a challenge, and a risky one.

While it may really seem distracting to enter you time in a timesheet daily, after each task or a part of a task fulfilled, you’re getting used to it in no time. The benefits of daily project time tracking are obvious, I think. Your time reports are accurate; you don’t have to bother memorizing all those exact numbers of hours and minutes. Project time tracking systems that suppose tracking time daily improve greatly project management, giving the responsible right and accurate information about the development in progress, tasks fulfilled and remaining, etc.

So, that was really a nice talk. =)

Hi!

Did you know you can easily connect to any Project Collection of TFS 2010 from TFS 2008 server? Well, direct connection is possible. The only limitation is that the function is available for TFS 2008 SP1. So, those lucky guys who works with have the Service Pack1 o VS 2008 installed will have no problems with TFS management in terms of working with 2010th version’s Project Collections from TFS 2008.

You’ll need the full URL of the Project Collection you’re going to work with. Enter it in the connection box in the format like following: http://[tfsserver]:[port]/[vdir]/[projectCollection]

As in TFS 2010 you are able to specify a virtual directory that it will run under, so with “tfs” being a default, you can have the same ports for everything.

In other words, if your tfs server name is “tfs01.domainname.com” and you take the default vdir of “tfs”, all you need is to add the name of the Project Collection you want to work with. As a result, you get the URL looking like this: http://tfs01.domainname.com:80/tfs/MyNewCollection.

And that’s it.

Hi!

Today, there is a variety of different project time tracking solutions available on the market. However, the idea of developing in-house system for time tracking is not very rare among organizations. There may be several reasons.

Sometimes chosen solution that suit company’s needs lack some peculiar functionality, or, vice versa, a company has a huge project time tracking solution, with lots of functions and capabilities most of which are never used. So, the wish to create the solution that comprises only the features, functionality, and capabilities that the company needs is really tempting. What is more, there is a possibility to easily extend functionality or add some necessary features.

However, the opponents have different arguments which are not in favor of developing time tracking software in-house. Primarily, it demand time and resources a company could use (and is better to use) on its core activities, if only developing project time tracking software is not, actually, company’s core activity. That’s wise. If an organization lacks technical staff, or doesn’t have enough expertise to develop such a solution, it’s better investigate and choose a device that fits the requirements the best. Again, there is a wide choice of solutions of different sizes and costs. Moreover, sometimes development kit is shipped together with the software, so IT staff could perform necessary customization.

So, having project time tracking software created to answer the company’s exact needs is great, no doubt. But before loading in-house IT staff with such a task, analyze time and resources needed to develop and implement the solution, and think about whether it would not affect badly company’s core activities.

Hi!

Not very long ago Brian Harry announced a survey on VSTS/TFS 2010 Beta 2. There people could share their opinion on the release and information about performance and other issues they’ve faced.

The results were both positive and negative. On the one hand, there’ve been done great improvements compared to Beta 1 release, and the number of people looking forward to have VS 2010 Beta 2 claimed to be more than ever.

But on the other hand, about thirty percent of respondents showed dissatisfactions with several features and with VS 2010 performance on the whole. As was reported, performance issues were mostly related to the areas of typing/Intellisense, project load, debugger, and C++ project.

As Harry said, they work hard on more improvements, and already have some good results. So, I suppose, the 2010 final release’s going to be something really great, and all those new features demand for proper VSTS training to make people familiar with all the functionalities.

Hi!
I’ve really almost missed it. However, it’s a great news regarding the improvements’ in TFS management and working with TFS.

It’s been quite for long that users asked for the possibility to integrate TFS with different data stores, or other version control & work item tracking systems, or helpdesks, etc. This possibility was partially represented by TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit, however, it was not good enough in addressing users’ needs.
Well, about a week ago the so called “alpha” release of TFS Integration Platform was announced, enriching possibilities in TFS management. There’ve been lots of changes applied to the platform, as compared to its predecessors.
Major improvements have been done to quality and robustness. Moreover, the documentation has been improved greatly to help developers better understand the platform. The steps have also been made toward better serviceability. What is more, this time the community has been involved in the project.

“Changing from “migration and synchronization” to simply “integration” was about simplifying the message about the purpose, and helping to disambiguate from upgrade scenarios which are often confused with migration. “ – Said Matt Mitrik, the project responsible.

Hi!

Again some new information about TFS/VSTS 2010.

According to Brian Harry, new set of Power Tools that support TFS 2010 will appear somewhat about this week.
Though this release will come with several limitations, meaning that the Power Tools will work with Visual Studio 2010 IDE exclusively, the majority of the features will work pretty good either with TFS 2010 or with earlier servers.

There’ve been changes and some improvements made about Power Tools, so TFS development is improved as well, some features were moved or replaced, some new features added. Thus, clean-up and bug fixing were added to Process Template Editor, different Command Line Interface introduced, updated Check in Policy Pack, and some more.
Team Members and TFS Server Manager don’t work yet with TFS 2010, however, the efforts to make them work are being done.

In fact, not so many of the Power Tools require updates, thanks to the great compatibility between TFS 2008 and TFS 2010, so, there’s not going to be any problems with that.

You may ask, why I’ve chose such a strange phrase for a headline. The answer is simple; I’ve met this phrase in somebody’s blog post, where unusual reasons for using time tracking tools were listed. I liked this one, as well as two more:

Because it’s the second more fun thing you can do with your right hand.

Because your granddad punched that time clock on the shop floor every day for 30 years, and you can’t click a mouse?

Nice ones, don’t you think so? In fact, it is not so easy to motivate people track their time spent on tasks. It’s a usual thing to hear from a developer, for example, about being distracted by the need to enter spent time into a task time tracker after each fulfilled task, or when switching from one task to another. While it takes only a couple of clicks.

I’m sure, many project managers have faced the challenge of making people understand the need of accurate time tracking. Explain how important is to collect and calculate billable hours, to report the right amount of them to a client. It’s normal for employees to be paid right and on time, so the fact that tracking the time spent on tasks accurately is the way to get that, is quite motivating.

Companies spend thousands on automated time tracking systems to have their productivity increased, to understand what more should be done to improve, to make accounting and billing more accurate, etc. So why not just use it without making PMs invent some tales about angel’s wings to motivate us?

Hey!

I’ve lately stumbled upon a blog post where a TFS 2010 user claimed issue with importing existing TFS 2008 database to TFS 2010 beta 2. Fortunately, he found the way out. So, I think the information could help if someone has just the same issue. TFS is a huge system and TFS management is something that may seem complex. I mean, it’s great that people share their experience in coping with difficulties.

So the issue occurred when the guy was utilizing “tfsconfig import” command and was going to execute the tfsconfig tool. He got the picture like one below:

The way he solved the issue comprised next steps:

Backup old TFS server databases, then restore them using the same SQL instance as used TFS 2010.

Then he utilized the next command:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools>tfsconfig import /sqlinstance:TFS2010 /collectionname:ImportCollection (the name of the collection may be any you want, actually)

When the import is done you should see something like this: