Category Archives: enterprise timesheet system

Using TimeControl with project management resource skill scheduling

Using TimeControl with Project Management tools and their skill scheduling, role scheduling and generic resource scheduling capabilities.
It has long been a common feature of enterprise project management tools from Oracle-Primavera, Microsoft and Deltek to allow resource assignments to be planned at a high level in the early stages of a project.

Deltek’s Open Plan calls this skill-scheduling. Microsoft Project/Project Server refers to it as generic resource scheduling and Oracle’s Primavera calls it role-scheduling.

Regardless of the product, the concept is the same. There are a small number of unnamed resource categories that are to be assigned to tasks for some time in the future. The tasks or perhaps the entire project is either not in production or is not soon enough to be ready to name an actual individual to that task yet if no assignment is made, it will be impossible to do forward looking resource capacity planning.

Once a project is ready to go into production or that phase of the project is close enough in time that we know who will be working on those tasks, the skill, generic or role-based entry in the tasks is expected to be replaced with the actual resource code. In many cases this might be the actual named resource who will perform the work but it might also be a category type of resource.

TimeControl’s link to the resource assignments in these project management tools expects to find the category or named resource. We import the assignment information to help populate the resource table then ask that each employee be associated to a resource entry in the project management system through the TimeControl Resource table. This allows the flexibility of going to a named or category resource. When TimeControl sends actual hours and costs back to the tasks it does so at the assignment level. TimeControl first looks for the task. If it doesn’t find it, it stops. If it does find it, it then looks for the assignment that matches the actual resource it’s about to update. If it finds it, it updates that assignment with the actual hours and optionally costs. If it doesn’t find that it polls the resource table in the project management system to find out if that resource exists anywhere. If it doesn’t, it stops. If it does, then depending on the options chosen in the TimeControl transfer, it adds an assignment to that task and updates the hours and costs.

This brings up dozens of possible conditions that TimeControl might find.

  • What if a task was assigned to Joe but Bill did the work? The result will be an unfulfilled assignment in the task for Joe and a completed assignment by Bill.
  • What if a task was assigned to a category or group resource and the employee is part of that group in TimeControl (by associating the group resource code to the employee). The result will be an update of the group assignment.
  • What if the project management user still has an assignment for a skill or generic resource but in TimeControl the resource is an individual? The result will be an unfulfilled assignment for the skill and an additional assignment for the individual.

So, why not carry the ability to move data back to skill categories in the project management tool? For the same reason that each of these tools recommends a best practice of replacing the temporary placeholders of skills with named resources as the project goes into production. The possibility is very real of double-counting resources. Skill scheduling makes perfect sense as a forward looking analytical practice, but in all of these tools, resources can have more than one skill. So, Bob is also an Administrator and an Engineer and a Designer. This might mean that while we think of Bob rather flexibly in forward planning, in day-to-day activities, he can only do one thing in each moment.

Reference Guides for all these products carry the same recommendations: Use skills in your forward planning exercise but replace them with resources before you get the task started. TimeControl follows this same recommendation in its design.

Getting Started and Stopped into your timesheet

Sometimes just entering the number of hours per task in a timesheet is insufficient information for an organization. In some situations, knowing the time that an employee was doing the work is essential to knowing how to invoice and track that task and that employee. When that’s the case, TimeControl has functionality designed to start the start and stop times of an employee’s work day.

In User Profiles, A TimeControl Administrator can elect to make the Start/Stop button appear on the timesheet of people with that role.

Start-Stop-SingleOne start and one stop per day
There are two options in the Start/Stop area: Single and multiple start stops. If Single Start/Stop has been turned on, then clicking the Start/Stop clock icon on the timesheet makes a series of columns appear above the timesheet grid. Each column allows the user to enter the start time and stop time of the day. The total hours for that day are then automatically calculated by TimeControl. The entries can also be automatically pushed into these values from external sources such as a security swipe-card system.

Once there are entries in the timesheet, they can be used in automated Validation Rules and will be maintained in that timesheet. Validation Rules could check to ensure that all the hours in a day are accounted for or check that there is a start stop time for each work day or that someone must have been onsite in order to book the hours.

Stop-Start-MultiMultiple starts and multiple stops per day
There are some organizations that will have staff whose time in and out must be checked in more detail. They might have multiple shifts per day or they might need to check out when they take a meal break and check back in when they return. For those organizations, TimeControl provides the Multiple Start/Stops per period option.

By selecting the Multiple Start/Stop option, users with this profile who click the start/stop clock icon will see a panel open to the left of the timesheet grid. This allows an unlimited number of “intervals” to be created for each day. The time in and time out will result in a total number of hours which are then totalled for the day. Once again, these values can be used in automated Validation Rules and the times are maintained with the timesheet record.

Taking starts and stops a bit further
There are some TimeControl users who need to track even more detail. TimeControl’s flexibility allows the system to be configured so that every line has a start field and stop field on it. A start and stop field could even be made for each day of the week to track the starts and stops for each task.

TimeControl allows not just whether you were working and what you did with your time to be tracked but also when you did what you were working on!

If you’d like to see Starts and Stops in action on TimeControl, then take a look at the mini-lesson called Tracking Start/Stop times on the timecontrol.com website.