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Looking for Efficiency in Project Management Reporting

Thursday Bram — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 21:00:30 +0000

In most organizations, the approach taken for managing projects evolves over years. Sure, you may start out with some out-of-the-box software solution, but that isn’t exactly how you wind up using it. For example, maybe Betty in payroll needs a weekly email with your team’s timesheet data. Even if you already use a tool that tracks the time the team works and where they spend it, you’ll probably have to cut and paste your reports to meet Betty’s exacting specifications. Similar questions come up every time you need to report information, making your processes inefficient.

Bringing Reporting to the Front

Many project management applications have reporting tools built in. The problem is that those reports don’t always match up with the sort of information that you need to be able to provide to the different levels of an organization. This can be especially inconvenient if you switch project management tools as it may then generate a disconnect between the way your new project management tool presents its information and the way your organization prefers to look at it.

Finding a way to bring the two together is crucial to being able to work efficiently with your project management tools. If you’re spending hours preparing reports, you won’t have as much time for working on the projects you ought to be focusing on. There isn’t always an easy solution to such situations, but it’s likely easier to change the information that you report to your organization rather than to change the software you’re working with. It can take some negotiation and inter-departmental conversations to convince your organization to use a reporting system that reduces your cut-and-paste time. It may not be possible to simply hand off the reports that your tools produce (after all, not all tools automatically produce every report you might need), but simplifying the process just a little can make a difference in the amount of time your need to spend on reporting.

The Paper Problem

In some organizations, there remains an expectation that all reports are made in hard copy, just as there are still plenty of organizations with members who print out every email. If your team is distributed, though, providing printed reports may slow things down: someone has to go into the office, print the reports and circulate them to the appropriate recipients. Difficult as it may be, making a change in your organization’s culture is likely the only way to make the situation easier to manage. Not only do the higher-ups of your organization need to become willing to receive electronic reports, but they need to be able to manage them and understand them. That may mean some education on your part.

Photo by Flickr user Nick Bramhall, licensed under CC 2.0

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Time Tracking: How Granular Should You Be?

Darrell Etherington — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:00:14 +0000

Lots of clients like you to track your time and submit reports detailing your daily activities, so they know their money is being spent well. It’s good practice for them, and it’s good practice for you, since you have a handy log of how you work, and you can then analyze and improve upon your habits using that information.

The trick with time tracking is arriving upon a degree of detail that’s both useful and efficient. It doesn’t help you if keeping track of things is all you end up doing because it’s such a time and attention-intensive process. Conversely, a general account of “Peformed project-related work” for a time block of eight hours isn’t particularly illuminating, either for the client or yourself. So how granular should your time tracking and reporting be?

I worked with one company that insisted on providing time reporting for all project staff in 15-minute increments to all of its clients. It might seem impossible, and in practice, it was, though that didn’t change the wording of the guidelines. What ended up happening was that either the client would demand simpler reporting, or company assets on assignment would “go native” and refuse to submit such ridiculously extensive accounting of their time.

Over time, the most sensible way of going about time tracking for the company became apparent. Generally speaking, project staff would report changes in activity throughout the day in blocks of time of no less than half an hour, and no more than three. Then before passing on said info to the client, administrative staff would edit it, depending on the needs and wants of the particular client stakeholder receiving the report.

As a web worker working on a contract basis from home, your process should be similar. The easy part is knowing to what degree of detail you need for your own purposes of professional development: experience will tell you that. Determining what a client wants is trickier, but should follow a similar logic. Arrive at a standard first through trial and error with some early projects, and then use that as the template for all future engagements. Solicit and pay attention to client feedback after that to determine what’s right for the person you’re currently working with.

As with most things, the best way to go about it is to avoid extremes. Report too much or too little, and you’re likely to either over- or underwhelm a client. The perfect balance is hard to achieve, but a good balance shouldn’t be too hard to arrive at.

How do you determine how granular to make your time tracking?

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Qrimp: Database Web Apps Made Simple

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:00:31 +0000

I am not usually one to create databases, or web apps. Typically, my job is to produce content, be it text or image, and let others worry about number, data, programming etc. That said, when working as a freelancer, you don’t always have the luxury of sticking to your specialty and hoping someone else will take care of the bits you’re not so sure about.

Looking around for a solution that would do some hand-holding while helping you set up databases and produce reports, I came across Qrimp (pronounced “crimp”). Qrimp is extensible, and customizable, so don’t get the impression that it would only appeal to hopeless cases like myself, but that is the angle I’ll be using to talk about the software.

After viewing the video demo available here, I set about seeing if I could replicate the same sort of thing using an expense report for my freelancing business covering a three month period. The data recognition used by Qrimps seems solid, since it accurately set up the table using the information I’d copied and pasted from my excel spreadsheet. It automatically knew what was a date, what was a dollar amount, etc. And in form view, data fields were easily rearranged without me having to look at even a scrap of code.

I also played with the live demo, where I went into existing reports to see what else you could do with Qrimp. With the “Oscars” database, you can see how easy it is for the web app to pull live data from external links, in this case IMDB. If you were working with a client, you could pull live data from their own web analytics or reporting tools, and the information would be instantly available, in table and report form.

Qrimp is a good resource for those of us who may have the creative chops or experience to devliver a great product, but who may not have the time, patience, or inclination to organize the numbers that businesses are really concerned with. Pricing starts at $5o per month, but if it saves me as much time and stress as I think it’s going to, it’ll be worth the money.

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3 Key Web Working Skills to Develop in 2009

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:00:19 +0000

If you’re a web worker, then you know the importance of constantly examining, reassessing and adding to your existing skill set. A successful online entrepreneur is almost always a extremely adaptable and eager to learn. As 2009 dawns, complete with continued economic unrest, this will be equally, if not more, true.

Targeting your professional development, however, in a preemptive rather than reactive way, is not always easy. Usually freelancers and consultants just roll with the punches and learn what they have to depending on client requirements. A little forethought, though, can go a long way to making you the applicant of choice before any contracts are awarded.

Skill 1: Working Knowledge of HTML and CSS

This is an oldie but goodie, and it will become even more important as companies start to streamline their IT departments. It happened to traditional freelancers and consultants when they were expected to bring desktop publishing skills to the table along with their analytical abilities, and it will happen with online workers as well. For employers, it’s simple math: fine one who’ll do the job of two. Here’s a useful free resource to start with.

Skill 2: Transparent Reporting

When spending is the key deciding factor behind any and all business decisions, good reporting practices can make all the difference. Show your prospective client that you have a solid, consistent reporting process that’s simple, straightforward, and transparent, and they’ll thank you by awarding you more contracts. Things to think about are the level of detail you put into your activity logs, what increments you use to account for your time, how you list and back up your expense claims, etc.

Skill 3: Twitter Networking

You may be a networking whiz, with all the LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace contacts one person can handle, but that doesn’t translate into instant Twitter success. That’s because Twitter’s a different beast altogether. Case in point: the overwhelming majority of my Facebook contacts have never even heard of Twitter, yet it boasts among its members the most powerful and successful people working online today.

Succeeding here means learning to converse instead of broadcast, giving people a reason to follow you beyond your portfolio, and treading the thin line between self-promotion and spamming. Check out Darren Rowse’s Twitip for some help getting started, or refining your Tweet-Fu.

I’m sure that as the year progresses, many other valuable skill sets will emerge, but you can bet that these three, at least, will continue to be relevant well into the future.

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