Do you log your time?

In my “Maximizing IT Capacity” webinar the first poll asks “How much of your time do you log? Of the choices, “none” is the most common response, with “project time only” running a distant second. Yet when it comes to understanding resource issues, actual time is the most valuable information around. By analyzing the prior 12 months time records at PeopleSoft IT, we increased our project capacity 30%, and staved off drastic staff cuts during the Oracle battle.

Why is this information so valuable? Properly analyzed, it provides insight into 3 key areas.

Feedback to project planning

In a PMO, we tend to concern ourselves with resource allocation to projects. We also spend a lot of time estimating task effort and resource requirements. Indeed, these estimates drive our project schedules, and ultimately the delivery dates promised to our customers.

So, how do we know if our planning is accurate? Most project managers rely on experience, and hope they’re close. But it’s the empirical date from time logs that reveals that the 40 hour task that completed on-time actually took 60. People worked overtime, or borrowed someone, to get the job done. And next time, we’ll estimate this task as a one-weeker again, but might not get so lucky.

Obviously, without tracking time, we are missing the feedback loop to our planning.

Analyzing resource constraints

So far, we’ve discussed time against individual projects. Of course, people often work more than one project, and there’s a lot of non-project work to be done as well. This leads to serious resource constraints, with employees and department manages alike complaining about the heavy load.

And what’s the first line out of an executive’s mouth when asked for more resources? “Prove it!” With proper time logs, you can. And you can prove it by department, resource type, skill-set, etc. And you may discover that your networking projects suffer not from a lack of resources in general, but from one skill-set in particular. At one client it turned out they had plenty of programmers, DBA’s, etc. What they were lacking were project managers!

Time is Money

The largest line item in most departmental budgets is payroll. Therefore, where a department spends it’s time is also where it spends it’s money. Analyzing time can reveal how much is spent on strategic vs maintenance, projects vs change-orders, etc. Instead of just looking at which projects fall into the strategic, informational, transactional, or infrastructure portfolios, the entire organization’s effort can be viewed this way. Put that in pie-chart report and watch the execs eat it up!