Time management is a must for the good implementation of any project. Only when employees and employers know where their working hours are spent can they gain insight into the efficiency of their work processes and allocate company resources more consciously.
Which activities have already been completed or how many still need to be done? How much time does each activity take? Can resources be used more optimally? All these questions deal with time tracking and proper reporting.
Every company tries to produce as much output as possible with as little input as possible during the realization of each project or contract. This requires the most efficient use of both the company’s capital and the work effort of all employees. In simple terms, this means that companies should regularly work on optimizing their work processes.
Evaluation of the workload
If you don’t measure your workload, you can’t assess how efficient and productive your work has been during a project. Systematic time recording opens new possibilities for businesses. It allows employees to measure exactly how much time and money they spend on each activity.
You are probably familiar with the following situation: you come to the office in the morning, make yourself a cup of coffee and sit down at your desk to create or start working on your to-do list for the day. As the day goes on, you tick more and more tasks off of your work plan, but how much time is devoted to which project? Are your expenses still within the allowable limits? If you want to keep track of how much time and money is being spent on each activity, you should measure your working hours.
Time tracking helps you evaluate your productivity at work. Meanwhile, you also optimize project management because you can closely monitor how much time your colleagues are investing in their tasks.
Proper project management
Status reporting
Projects quickly become complex. If you lose track, you run the risk of wasting a lot of capital in a matter of weeks without any significant progress. To run your projects successfully and without major complications, you need to maximize the full potential of your staff and effectively improve mistakes instead of repeating them. In other words, you must hold the steering wheel in your hand and regularly try to get an overview of the status of the project.
You can use tools like Google Docs or Excel spreadsheets to record or view your work steps and those of your colleagues. However, these tools are nothing if you only share documents back and forth in team chat. That’s why we suggest using a team management software like Weekdone Team Compass, which not only allows you to share documents, but also to keep inter-team and internal communication in one place.
In practice, it is often crucial for the success of a project to regularly monitor the actual progress of the project and compare it with the projected action plan. If your project is taking longer than expected, not only do you need to find out quickly, but you also need to be able to react quickly by optimizing your working methods.
The big mistake of some project managers is that they evaluate their projects at the end. In this way, they miss dozens of warnings that the project is moving away from the original plan and must settle for average or poor results in the end. If you monitor the project regularly from the beginning, it gives you the opportunity to identify problem areas early and adjust workflows.
During the implementation of every project there are problems and obstacles that need to be overcome. But, this does not mean that the project and its results need to fail!
Effective project management allows you to identify complications early, find solutions to them faster and implement them as soon as possible to achieve satisfactory results at the end. And regular time tracking will help you to manage it.
Time Tracking
Time tracking gives you an accurate overview of the current progress of the project, work performance and previous expenditures.
To keep track of everything in your company, it’s important to document everything easily. At the same time, it’s important to know how your employees use their time for different tasks. In the work process, team members also need to know how they are progressing in their work to ensure the success of the project.
The basic steps for an efficient work process are:
- Plan
- Communicate,
- Implement,
- Evaluate,
- Improve,
- Optimize
- Repeat 1-6
This is a cycle that always has potential for improvements.
With easy-to-use time tracking software like TimeTrack, you can keep track of your costs, progress and tasks and make the best use of your resources. Manage your precious time wisely and make efficient use of your hard-earned budget.
Through self-evaluation, you can use the full potential of your employees and eliminate mistakes – instead of repeating them. Time tracking can boost your team’s motivation and productivity at any time. Remember: your employees are your most valuable resource. So be sure to evaluate your colleagues’ workload.
As you can see, good time management is essential for a good project and teamwork. This is the key to keeping track of your resources and keeping the project profitable. It’s the only way to measure, evaluate and improve your workload.
With time tracking and status reporting – you can easily optimize your work processes today.
Written by: Katarina at www.timetrackapp.com