We’ve been talking about this subject for years.

So many organizations fine project management a challenge and for many, just getting a solid plan for an upcoming project is a victory. For a lot of organizations, project management stops there.

“But wait”, I’m told. “We use Agile.”

That may be true but the vast majority of clients I talk to are using Agile like a sprint checklist and when those teams are asked to determine the effort spent on creating a feature or the effort expended compared to a budget that management saw months or longer ago, it is impossible to answer.

This causes a big disconnect in organizations large and small. Management are left with executive level budgets are asked to answer for how they will spend the organization’s money, how much they can accomplish with that money and what the money being spent now has produced.

At the project management level we find project managers squeezed between the executive and the people doing the work with the executive demanding to know the value of what’s being produced and how much longer it will take and the tactical-level users simply saying “We do what you tell us.”

Just having a project schedule or a project plan is not enough. We need more than the Agile Backlog of things to do. We need a plan with a budget (in effort, money or both). More than anything we need to track.

For some organizations, they will get started with tracking just on a percentage or complete/incomplete basis. “Look, they might say, I can show you all the Agile cards we’ve closed as complete.”

But this is rarely sufficient for long.

Even having a task marked as complete doesn’t tell the whole story needed for management to make a whole range of decisions.

How much effort was spent on that task is one of the key elements needed?

So, despite almost everyone wanting to avoid it, filling in a timesheet becomes a necessary part of life for any project-based organization. And, that timesheet needs to track more than just whether someone was in attendance or not. It needs to track the work done at sufficient detail that management can categorize and make decisions from it.

That’s not news to us. We wrote our first project-based timesheet in 1984 and released TimeControl as a commercial product in 1994.
Deploying a project-oriented, task-level timesheet is a critical element of a successful organization in today’s hyper-speed world.
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e’ve been talking about this for a long time. You can read an article on the subject on the EPMG Guidance site at: www.epmguidance.com/2009/08/26/project-management-is-not-just-planning/.
Or, if you’d like to talk to us about project-based timesheets, contact us.