We are excited to see our President, Chris Vandersluis interviewed on Raised. Mr. Vandersluis talks about his 40 years leading HMS Software and the remarkable 30 year history of TimeControl. The interview is available on the XRaised site or Spotify. For more information about the interview or any of the subjects discussed by Mr. Vandersluis, contact HMS Software.
TimeControl is in use in virtually every time-zone in the world. One of the questions we are often asked is how we will support the local display for users in different places who are all part of the same organization and same TimeControl instance. This term is commonly referred to as localization in the software industry.
TimeControl has several answers for that.
TimeControl ships with numerous language translations including French, English, Spanish etc. But, that’s often not enough. Even in a single language, many clients ask us if they can modify some of the terms that TimeControl uses. Perhaps the term “Task” is used instead of “Charge” or “Initiative” is the standard term in that organization for “Project. For this reason, TimeControl ships with the Language module included. A client can create numerous modified languages. They can copy from an existing language and then make their own variant. The same module allows a client to literally add a language we have never translated. Usually, only a tiny fraction of TimeControl’s terms have to be translated as this is usually most significant for the individual users who the client has defined to have the least amount of menu items to select from.
The labels on a page, the menu items, even the error messages can be modified.
Since this is a user-profile oriented aspect of TimeControl, this allows one language to be used for one group (in one country for example) and a different language to be used for a different group.
It’s a powerful aspect of TimeControl.
Many of the display options for TimeControl are either defined within the application (for example the currency symbol) or are derived from the browser’s “culture”. This makes TimeControl automatically show 30/10/2024 for our Canadian users and 10/30/2024 for our American users. Internal options for display options are either in the System Preferences (where they would appear for all users) or User Profiles (where they would appear only for those users with that User Profile.
Some options (such as select a language) are also changeable within each user’s MyAccount area.
Aside from TimeControl-supplied documentation, what about an organization’s own process guide for using TimeControl. You can replace the documentation that is supplied with the product (or hide it) and instead, display your own. This can be used to show different language format guides (we supply both English and French user guides) or just display the how-to guide on the internal process along with where to direct your questions.
We work on the Languages module and display options within almost every version of TimeControl and we often use this feature ourselves when we are helping an organization deploy the product. The language module is in both the on-premise and on-line versions of TimeControl.
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.
We are delighted to add Idexia to our list of Partners this month. Idexia is a Quebec-based consulting firm specialized in the Microsoft productivity, collaboration and development ecosystem. They have experience in project management systems such as Microsoft Project and BrightWork both of which are included as integrations in TimeControl. We have worked with members of the Idexia team for many years so we are very excited that they are now part of our Alliance Partner Program. This aspect of the TimeControl Partner system allows Idexia to recommend TimeControl when it’s the most appropriate and effective solution for their client but does not restrict them from recommending other time and project systems.
This relationship allows HMS to share additional TimeControl resources and access to TimeControl to better server our mutual clients.
You’ll find Idexia now listed on the HMS Software site on the Partner Page and on the TimeControl site on the Dealer Page. You can find out more about Idexia and their services on their website at: idexia.com.
We’ve been asked to talk about this topic numerous times since the mid 1990s when the first ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) packages were expanding at a rapid rate.
“Is it better”, we were asked, “to select the best of each category of software or instead, to select one package that can do everything at once?”
The conversation would become known as All-in-One vs. Best-in-Class.
The answer from us is always the same. We see the desire for both Technical management and Finance management to get one system that will do everything. The advantages on paper are easy to display: The all-in-one product is *already* integrated. It is only one package to maintain, not multiple. So, it must be the best choice… Right?
Except it’s often not.
Our answer to people who ask about this is always the same. It’s the best choice to go with an all-in-one solution so long as it does what you need. If it doesn’t then very quickly you will end up where you started, with multiple timesheet systems.
And that is incredibly costly.
Over the years, it has happened from time to time that a client informs us that they won’t be using TimeControl anymore. Their Finance Department has changed or a new CFO has arrived with experience of different tools at previous organizations. The company will “change directions” we’re told and TimeControl, while working fine, will be retired.
Our response to this is always positive. “If your new solution does everything you need, then we wish you good fortune,’ we say.
In situation after situation, we get a call 3, 6, 9 months later “Um, we were a little hasty in moving off of TimeControl,” we’re told. It turned out that the alternate solution doesn’t actually do everything we were already used to and the person who is noticing the gaps the most turns out to be our CFO.”
“No worries,” we explain. “We’ll work at getting your system back up and running with whatever updates you might need.”
It’s not that people can’t figure this out in advance. The problem with a timesheet system is that it’s often taken for granted. After all, employees use their timesheet for 5 to 10 minutes a week. It is in the background of their experience. But TimeControl is an enterprise timesheet which often has many links with other tools and multiple processes in the organization. The administrators appreciate the complexities of the overall system and, if they’re still involved, so do the people who deployed it. But it’s an easy part of a corporate system to not pay much attention to as you’re making a sweeping systems change.
It’s not always the same thing with each client. Often it’s the multiple layers of the approvals process that a new tool doesn’t support. Sometimes it’s a simultaneous link with Payroll on one side and a project management tool like Primavera on another. Other times it’s the degree to which the flexibility of TimeControl has been employed to meet multiple internal needs at the same time.
And TimeControl can flex.
So we don’t stress too much when a client says they’re looking at alternates other that to be certain that it’s not because there is something in TimeControl the client isn’t happy with. That we respond to in a very different way.
After all, happy clients are what has made HMS and TimeControl so successful for decades.
To find out more about TimeControl and how it links with ERP systems like SAP and Oracle, see the TimeControl.com/use-cases/links-to-erp page.
We are delighted to share an article written about our President, Chris Vandersluis. He was recently interviewed by Business Talk Magazine about his 40 years leading HMS Software, and making it into a leading publisher of project management and project timekeeping systems. Mr. Vandersluis describes the evolution of TimeControl over 30 years from version 1.0 in 1994 to the soon-to-be released version 8.6.
You can read the article in its entirety at: businesstalkmagazine.com/interviews/chris-vandersluis-helping-companies-in-raising-the-bar-for-project-management.
It’s almost never enough to just approve a timesheet based on the total hours in it. If you are in any kind of project or activity-based scenario, you will still need to approve the total time for the timesheet, but you will also want to do approvals for the projects.
We encountered this problem way back in 1983 as we wrote our first timesheet. There were two groups sponsoring the initiative. One was Finance. They needed total hours to be able to properly pay people and both Finance and HR needed to know when people were not working and why, again to determine the payroll properly as well as determine what entitlements like vacation and sick-leave have been taken by each employee. But that was what only the one group needed. Also sitting at the table was the Project Management department. They had a burning need to track not just how much time was being spent each week. They needed to know exactly what it was being spent on. They already had project plans, what they didn’t have was project actuals. They were being asked by management to describe budget vs. actual progress on each project and they simply didn’t have the data.
Easy, right?
It wasn’t actually. It took numerous design sessions where one side of the table or the other was unhappy before we finally realized the crux of the challenge was that we would need both approvals for the whole timesheet totals and separate approvals line by line.
Ten years later we carried that philosophy into the first commercial release of TimeControl with both organizational approvals and project manager approvals. We also created a whole process to support those functions and called it the Matrix Approval Process for Labor Actuals™. Which is still a core element of TimeControl today. In that process, supervisors approve the whole timesheet and look at attendance and things like personal time off and sick leave. Project Managers get to approve or reject each project task when that task came from a project management system such as Microsoft Project or Primavera.
It was a big success.
As TimeControl matured we were faced with several new challenges. It wasn’t enough to do approvals of each line just for the project managers. Plus, not everyone was using a commercial project management system around which we’d designed the first pass of the Project Manager Validation function. Now we were asked could we also make independent line approvals for billable items, for contractor time vs. salary staff, for time to be exported into HR with approvals of entitlements.
That resulted in the Line Item Approval function. It works just like the Project Manager Validations but is based on an export interface. Let’s say your TimeControl environment has an export for Contractors. The idea is that individual contractors can review and approve the time their people spent on the project on a line-by-line basis. Then, once they get around to invoicing their client, both sides have already approved the time. Think that might not be a big deal? We’ve watched several clients do this and reduce the approval time of contractor invoices from between 90 and 120 days all the way down to 3-5 days. The impact on both the contractor and the client can be profound.
Line Item Approval basically lets us create an unlimited number of task-by-task approval processes all from the same timesheet line. We don’t delete that line (we never do in TimeControl anyway to ensure auditability) but the timesheet can get auditable adjustments if needed or the lines that are deemed unacceptable for that process can simply be put aside during the actual transfer of data for that purpose. Let’s say you’ve created a Line Item Approval for billing and a Billing Manager reviews all the lines that are about to get transferred into the billing system and made into a summary and then an invoice. By rejecting certain lines, perhaps for unbillable work, the Billing Manager effectively removes those hours from the billing transfer and thus the client’s invoice. The hours don’t evaporate from TimeControl, but they won’t ever be transferred to the invoicing system.
We can’t really make a graphic of this process because it’s three-dimensional. But, imagine the matrix grid and then imagine it has a third dimension with as many layers as you need approval processes. Often it’s just another one or two or three. But the effects on the company can be massive.
Think we’re done? Think again.
In the next version of TimeControl we’ll be introducing enhancements to the Line Item Approval (internally we call it LIA) Process and have even gone back to the original Project Manager Validation function to align the functionality of both features. Line Item Approval is already one of the most popular aspects of TimeControl and its flexibility ensures it can adapt to almost every approval requirement.
Auditability, Accountability and Flexibility. It’s a powerful combination.
Find out more about Approvals on the TimeControl.com website at: TimeControl.com/use-cases/matrix-approvals.
Over the years here at HMS we’ve become used to questions about how TimeControl compares to other products. Our answers are always the same. We don’t publish those kinds of comparisons. Whatever we would say about another product would be unfair as we aren’t experts in whatever those other products are. What we’ve done instead is to provide tools for prospective clients to find out what is great about TimeControl and make it easier to compare against other products.
Introduce: The Buyers Guide.
The Timesheet Buyers Guide is hosted on the TimeControl website and contains a wealth of information for anyone looking to buy a project-oriented timesheet system. There are white papers, factsheets and even calculators that any prospective buyer or subscriber can use to evaluate their own possible choices. The page is called the Timesheet Buyers Guide, not the TimeControl Buyers Guide deliberately.
For those who say, but what about TimeControl, there are even pre-prepared Excel comparison grids where we’ve already added in the answers for TimeControl or TimeControl Industrial and left a couple of columns blank for prospective clients to do their own research.
It’s better for HMS and for possible clients to get the bulk of their simplest answers quickly and opens the door for us to start talking about how we can use those features to solve real-world business problems once we start talking.
The Timesheet Buyers Guide is available to all without charge or need to register at: buyersguide.timecontrol.com.
Many versions of TimeControl ago, we were confronted with a dilemma.
How do we search the TimeControl tables?
TimeControl is architected around many interrelated tables and each of these tables can hold dozens or hundreds of fields. Some of these fields may be designed for internal system use. Some may contain data. Some may only contain data if that TimeControl instance has been configured to use those fields.
Presenting a search dialog that would search every single field in every single table was not a solution. The possible returns for a search inquiry would deliver many, many more possible returns than was useful. After all, if you’re searching for something, the point is to find it!
So we created the Search Interface Configuration. It is located in the Maintenance menu of TimeControl and is often set up only during the initial configuration or perhaps from time to time when additional User Defined fields are created and configured.
The configuration is extremely simple. The Administrator simply selects which fields on a particular table will be ones they want to use for searching. All the main tables are there to be configured.
The effects of the configuration are felt in the interface of each table. On the top left of each screen above the list of table entries, is the “Search” bar. Entering criteria for the search here will honor all the fields that have been selected in the Search Interface Configuration. What could be easier?
This structure allows a TimeControl Administrator to have the best of both worlds: a simple interface that any user can take advantage of and at the same time, robust search functionality that can extend to whatever fields are relevant to them.
It’s just another way that TimeControl can be adapted to every client.
There are so many ways under the covers that TimeControl saves time and after a couple of versions, we start to think of them as always there and give them too little credit.
A great example is TimeControl Table Templates.
As everyone who has ever administered TimeControl knows, there are a number of tables that make the flexibility of the system so powerful and yet easy for end users. They include tables for Users, Employees, Projects, Charge Codes, Resources, Rates, Extended Rates, WBS, Assignments, Hierarchies and Assignments as well as Resource Planning.
All the Table interface screens are based on the same navigation structure and look and feel but of course, all of them are different based on their content. For every table however, you can define a Default Table Template. The information saved in that template will automatically populate the table for any new record. That can be a massive time saver for Administrators.
It’s a simple feature to use, create a new record, add only the data that you’d like to automatically appear and then under the More… Menu, click save as Default. If you already have a Default Template you can edit it from that same menu. So, let’s say as an Administrator you’ll be working on the North American Employee table all day today. It would be handy to pre-populate the user defined fields for location and office and anything else specific to the North American employees so you don’t either forget it or mis-enter it. That can come automatically out of the Default Template. Perhaps tomorrow you’ll be working on the European Employee Table. No problem, just edit the Default Template to change the user defined fields to the European standard values and save that. Now, the default fields will be automatically populated in that way.
This isn’t the only time saving and quality checking method in Tables. Table Validation Rules can also check for things you’ve set up. For example, let’s say you have a User Defined field for Employee Type and when you select “Contractor” you want to be certain that the Contractor Name field is populate with one of the possible selections. But, if the Employee Type field is “Salaried” then you want to be certain that the Contractor Name field is empty. This is an easy Table Validation to create and will help ensure the quality of your table data.
These features are all explained in TimeControl’s Reference Manual.
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