We are often asked a series of questions in sequence about TImeControl.  It usually sounds like this:

“Does TimeControl support Agile?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Does TimeControl support Waterfall?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Ah, but we have some project management using Waterfall and some project management using Agile.  Does TimeControl support a Hybrid project management environment?

“It certainly does.”

For those who don’t follow project management terms every day, let’s just first distinguish these three approaches.  Agile Project Management has been an up and coming methodology in which mostly technology project are divided into short term “sprints” of work.  We consider this a tactical level or team level process.  Waterfall is the name given to project management that might be more classically rendered in a GANTT barchart and the name comes from how many of these barcharts look with bars shifting to the right of the calendar the further down you go and thus the impression that water would drip from one bar to the next.  In our experience we’ve found that almost no company is completely Waterfall or completely Agile despite their best efforts and what used to be thought of as an interim position: Hybrid, has lately become a target process.

TimeControl thinks of each project distinctly.  Each project can be managed internally in TimeControl or have its plan integrated with an external system in products like Microsoft Project Online or Oracle Primavera or Atlassian’s JIRA. This gives us tremendous flexibility in serving up the simplest of questions to the end user: “Just tell me what you did with your time this week.”

On a Friday afternoon when their timesheet is the only barrier between a long work week and starting their weekend, the end user doesn’t care much about whether the task they worked on was displayed on an Agile board or a GANTT chart at the beginning of the week.  They don’t care if it was originally defined in a sprint or the HR department or a project schedule.  They just want to report their time and file their timesheet and be done.

In TimeControl, that’s exactly what they get.  One of the benefits of TimeControl is how it links to so many disparate project and corporate systems simultaneously.  Perhaps there are multiple versions of Microsoft Project being used. Perhaps some work is being tracked in an Agile tool.  Perhaps some was created right in TimeControl.  All these tasks can appear on the same timesheet in the same interface and that’s where TimeControl makes a huge difference.  Without a multi-purpose timesheet like TimeControl that can support multiple tools and multiple methodologies, organizations are left with multiple timesheets.  The Agile tool has one, the Waterfall tool another, the administrator something else, the HR people yet another.  TimeControl’s design was to bring all that together into a single place.

So, Waterfall, Agile, Hybrid?  You decide.  TimeControl’s ready.

You can find out more about different use-case scenarios on the TimeControl Solutions Page.