Lack of control over TFS timesheet management and reporting can be the reason for various concerns related to both your customers and employees, such as decreased customer loyalty, employees’ poor motivation, lower working output, and other negative consequences.

Let’s say your employees have to work overtime to complete the project within the set deadline. Normally, overtime job is rated higher than the regular working hours. No doubt, TFS is a great tool, but does it provide the possibility to calculate overtime hours that are supposed to be paid by higher rates? The answer is no. Neglecting this issue can lead to inaccurate cost accounting, which it its turn can damage your company’s reputation.

What you need is TFS timesheet software that is flexible enough to provide different rate settings for regular working hours and overtime ones. TFS timesheet software should monitor and record employees’ hours, including working hours, vacation time, sick leave, overtime and holidays, and calculate employees’ wages accordingly.

That way, your staff will never question their hours and the HR department will be able to focus on issues other than handling the overtime payouts.

TFS reporting is often needed to provide team leaders and project managers with relevant information on actual working hours. It happens quite often that estimated time is exceeded, or that an executor is out of office. And I haven’t even mentioned that different tasks on one project are performed by different people. Who needs to be notified to approve actual working hours and how TFS reporting can help team leaders and project managers to work more efficiently and allocate their responsibilities?

Should a report go to the head of the department, to the executor, to the account manager, who is responsible for calculating working hours, or may be TFS reports should be directly presented to a CEO? Do all those people need to be notified at all? Or may be they have something better to do than to handle this estimated/completed time inaccuracy?

TFS is a great tool, but it does not provide for customized reports. Fortunately, it does provide for integration with time tracking and TFS reporting tools. That’s what makes TFS reporting a neat thing. You can adjust reports to be approved by an appointed administrator. The time reports on one type of projects can go to a team leader, other reports go to an account manager, and some reports go directly to a CEO.

I think, it’s a nice way to allocate the responsibilities and it is indeed helpful.

Yesterday, I had a very interesting discussion with a friend of mine about project time tracking. Being a project manager in a small company, he’s been looking forward to find some project time tracking tool that could help him get more accurate data on time, as the way of time tracking they were used to often proved to be inaccurate and time consuming. So, my friend needed to find arguments to convince his executive in the efficiency of the efficiency of project time tracking software versus spreadsheets.
As a result of this talk, I decided to describe the difficulties a project manager faces when using the old-fashioned means of project time tracking, such as a kind of shared calendars to plan tasks and activities, and weekly Excel spreadsheets where actual time spent on those activities is marked.

1. Inaccuracy in the reported time. – Shared calendars are great to plan some activities, as a manager may add changes to the tasks or appoint tasks for the next week or even month. The problem is that when it comes to entering the time spent on tasks in Excel spreadsheets manually, the probability of making a mistake is very high. Moreover, hardly everyone may remember (or mark in a calendar) the exact time it took them to fulfill this or that task. When company’s clients are billed for time-and-material, it’s more than just inconveniency.
2. Consolidating all spreadsheets takes too much time. – Even in a small company of about 30 employees getting all the Excel timesheets together is a pain. It takes a significant amount of time. But to worsen the things, someone may suddenly need changes in his/her spreadsheet, as misspelled the numbers, or “completely-forgot-about-that-little-five-minute-task…” I say, it’s a nightmare.
3. Time-consuming reporting. – Then a project manager needs to make reports for accountants, for customers, for executives, etc. out of the information received, which is also rather time-consuming.

Project timesheet software eliminates the double work of entering and re-entering the data from calendars to spreadsheets. Entering the time spent on tasks daily provides more accurate data, and there’s a far less chance for making a mistake.

There’s no need to wait for the spreadsheets to come, as the data gets into a single system, and a project manager has the access to the information just as soon as it is entered.

Moreover, there’s no need to spend loads of time on making reports, as project timesheet software, commonly, provides the possibility of creating different kinds of reports automatically. The reports for accounting, billing, etc. are done faster, and much more accurately, thus providing more accurate and actual calculations.

P.S. The problem is that my friend’s executive is a kind of far away from being a geek, using his PC once a week to check e-mails. He’s absolutely satisfied with the way project time tracking is performed currently. Hope, however, as my friend’s going to provide him with detailed calculations of the savings the customers and the company can achieve, thanks to accurate billing, his eyes and his heart will open to the progress.

Today, most companies have implemented or intend to implement and use software for project time tracking. But what exactly they should track?

Some mangers insist on tracking everything, every single step or activity aiming to be aware of how exactly an employee spends every minute of the working day. But this is, actually, time tracking for the sake of time tracking. And in such a situation I can understand guys who say they’re just wasting their time.

There should be a clear purpose for the use of project time tracking software. The key is to define the metrics and understand what data (received through project time tracking) will be useful for different business purposes. They may be accurate billing, productivity and efficiency tracking, project estimations, etc. So, when the purpose is known, it becomes easier to choose the project time tracking tool that can provide the necessary data

Project time tracking software is not just a tool for tracking time spent on different tasks and activities. It supposes that information will be analyzed and used to bring value into business.

Hi!

There’s no doubt that when a company outsources the development of their software products, they want a good possibility to better control everything about the outsourced project. Here project timesheet software is a great controlling tool that can provide a lot of information.

How much time developers spend on different tasks is not just a way to be sure the work is being done. Project timesheet software gives a clear image of developers’ productivity, and gives a great opportunity for improvement.

Most of project timesheets allow a variety of reports that can be used for accurate billing. Moreover, using the data in the reports helps find a space for improvement, control the project progress, and probably, make new project estimations on time and budget. This enhances greatly the quality of business, as project timesheet software eases management of the outsourced software development team to a great extent.

In one of my previous postings, I wrote about a rendez-vous with a friend of mine, the developer, whose way to entertain me was quite peculiar. To be exact, he was complaining about software for project time tracking, they started to use, and how much he was against it, etc.

My point was (as I got furious) that the problem, probably, was in his resistance to make an effort and adopt the new way of project time tracking. However, motivating people (in that case, employees) to adopt something, is a challenge. Here a lot depends on the software, rather than on people.

People are so often devoted to “old good way of doing something,” even if it takes a lot of time. As the idea of project time tracking software is to save time, it should be easy to use. When software has poor or bewildering user interface, for example, or a bunch of unnecessary features, it’s hardly to be adopted enthusiastically.

Then, form the technical point of view, software for project time tracking should be easily integrated with other company’s systems, so the data on time that employees spend on tasks could be accessed from different departments.

In fact, project time tracking, is not the general part of work on the project. It helps to control (self control, as well) and analyze employees’ productivity, as well as search the place for improvement. Employees need solutions that make their jobs easier and become a part of their daily routine. Software for project time tracking that possesses these qualities (apart from functionality, etc.) will be easily adopted.

P.S. And surely, it will not become the subject to be discussed on a date!

Project time tracker is a very effective and essential part of any successful business; however, to get the most out of it, a company should make the right choice from a variety of offerings. The right choice means that the project time tracker suits company’s goals and possibilities the best. There are a number of factors to pay special attention to, in order to avoid an inappropriate purchase.

• Usability. Good usability leads to faster adoption of a project time tracker, while poor usability may result in strong resistance and the need to look for another solution (which means additional expenses and wasted time).
• Functionality. Here the major features and functionality a project time tracker provides should be analyzed and compared to company’s requirements. Often, large companies have more requirements and demand for wider set of features than SMBs.

Possibilities for support and maintenance, including various updates, add ons, etc.
Compatibility. There should be a possibility to integrate a project time tracker with other company’s systems, as the data, provided by the tool, may be used by different departments (HR, accounting, etc.)

Hi!

Project timesheet software, apart from giving clear idea on how and on what tasks employees spend their time, affects greatly billing. This fact speaks in favor of using automated timesheet software against Excel spreadsheets (not speaking about paper-based time tracking).

Usually, invoices are sent to clients, when account managers get the information of all the hours spent on the project by each member of the team. And a team supposes a number of people – developers, project managers, etc. Collecting this information is quite an effort, as people may not submit their hours or send spreadsheets on time, they may get sick, or by any other reason… This becomes more challenging if the development team is comparatively big (which is a common situation with complex projects). Moreover, employees’ rates are different.

So, without project timesheet software gathering the information and making all the calculations necessary to prepare invoices may be really time-consuming and error-prone. Project timesheet software makes this process faster, as the changes and corrections employees make in their timesheets (when timesheet software is used) are made in real time. So account managers get this information faster, with no, or at least, less mistakes, and are able to prepare invoices withing a shorter period of time.

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 =)