Project Management and Project Management Tools
Published: 25/11/2024
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This article will explore how time management tools aid project management and why you should include them in your processes as soon as possible. Additionally, we will compare traditional solutions to digital time tracking.
Project management and time management go hand in hand. With every project having a set of deadlines for different phases and overall completion, being smart with time is crucial. It may sound simple at first, but with the amount of logistics and moving parts in every project, you’re doomed to failure without prior preparations. With how fast-paced and demanding today’s market is, traditional time management solutions fall short in their efficiency, but modern challenges also have modern solutions.
Living in the era of digitisation, we are offered a broad market of time management tools. Numerous solutions are dedicated to aiding project managers with smoother workflows, improved efficiency, and continuous improvement opportunities. However, some companies remain sceptical of digitisation and hinder themselves by sticking to traditional methods.
Time management is a fundamental part of project management, ensuring smooth delivery that doesn’t go past delivery and expense estimates. It is a cornerstone of any project, for previous time-related data lays the foundation for project forecasts, and data recorded during the process dictates the project’s flow.
Being efficient in time management results in informed decisions regarding project budget distribution, task prioritisation, and resource allocation. A project's success relies heavily on these factors, so establishing a tight connection between time management and project management is essential to achieve better performance.
Having discussed the correlation between the two, let’s talk about time tracking in project management in depth and how it contributes to your processes' instant and long-term improvement.
Estimating and utilising the project budget efficiently is crucial to its success. Time tracking is irreplaceable for this task. It helps to monitor performance and to adjust project forecasts as you go, in turn enabling informed decisions in ways to optimise the workflows. All in all, it grants instant visibility filled with actionable data, leading to better budget use and, consequently, higher project profitability and success. Having insights into the time spent on each task or phase of the project arms you with an understanding of the potential costs involved. This data is invaluable when estimating future projects as it helps you both forecast and prepare better, as well as deepen further insights.
Utilising time tracking can also help you tackle common project management issues such as scope creep. Given it often occurs in stages, scope creep often goes unnoticed until it stacks up and causes overruns. Tracking time, on the other hand, can pinpoint it relatively fast and, therefore, address it before it festers. Keeping an eye on your team’s time expenditure will also help you set benchmarks for productivity, potentially helping your team finish tasks ahead of schedule and enabling you to move the remaining budget around. All in all, time tracking gives you visibility, and with it comes flexibility and accuracy when it comes to your project budget.
Becoming efficient at resource allocation is crucial to delivering flawlessly executed projects on time every time, as well as not surpassing the budget. The challenge is to rely on more substantial data than intuition or guestimates. Time tracking in project management supplies you with the said data. Not only does it give you visibility of the team’s overall progress, but also highlights individual performances.
Having data-backed information on how long specific tasks take your team to complete will make your forecasting faster and more accurate. Understanding where your workers excel and struggle will also help you be wiser when distributing tasks and prioritising them. A digital time tracking solution also provides this data in a centralised view, often in a visual and digestible format. To dive further, most platforms offer in-depth reporting, with features like side-to-side comparisons, graphs, and many more. All in all, by simply recording your team’s time, you can take their efficiency to a new level.
There are different ways to track time. While traditional ways have a proven record of doing the job, they aren’t sufficient for today’s environment. In fact, they often hinder your progress. This is why you should choose digital solutions instead.
One key reason to choose digital time tracking for project management over traditional timesheets or Excel spreadsheets is it being less prone to manual entry errors. Most digital solutions can be customised to implement time rules, meaning your employees won’t be able to go past a preset cap. Additionally, the risk of keying in wrong numbers when logging data into other solutions will decrease significantly. Bonus points if your digital time tracking solution integrates with other tools, granting seamless and accurate data transfers.
The reason it matters is that these errors can seriously damage both the flow and the outcome of your projects. One incorrect number will wreak havoc on the overall data, and the consequences can affect not just the decisions you make but how you allocate the budget, your forecasts and the amount of labour required. All in all, the risk posed by manual entry errors is too great to gamble, especially when simply digitising tasks related to it can almost fully eliminate it.
Projects that are billed on an hourly or time-and-material basis are particularly in need of digital time tracking solutions for the purpose of accuracy. Often, billing will include different rates ranging on a plethora of factors, and therefore, calculating them can get complicated. Not to mention, this is also the area where many errors occur, and those can significantly sour your relationship with both the clients and the employees.
Ensuring accurate tracking of billable hours, on the other hand, reduces that risk. Most time tracking solutions will take over calculating the correct rates attached to specific time frames or tasks, freeing you from the burden. Not to mention, if the setup is done correctly, there is almost no chance of errors. This approach ensures your clients are charged fairly for the time spent on their projects, and your workers are compensated accordingly, too. Keeping it fair will benefit you not just in terms of reputation but also revenue loss prevention due to underreporting.
Making a change is often an uncomfortable and scary experience. Fear of the unknown, wariness of the adjustment period, and worries about the negative impact on business are common reasons for delaying digitisation. But you must not let them win.
It may feel like you’re late to jump on the digitisation bandwagon, or you might be under the impression you’re not ready to commit to it just yet. Both are incorrect, for the best time to add digital tools to your operations is now. The process of digitisation is highly personable. Different businesses pursue different goals, prefer different solutions, and move at different paces. Therefore, there is no right or wrong answer.
Not to mention, digitisation isn’t a one-off. It’s an ongoing process for you will tinker and optimise your efforts as you go. The sooner you begin collecting actionable data, the quicker you’ll be able to reap the results. You don’t have to start big, either. In fact, it’s recommended to proceed one step at a time because everything you do stacks up. Digitising your business is a long-term strategy, and depending on your approach, it can take a long time. This is why there is no better time to kickstart it than now.
Budget and resource allocation are two pillars of project success. Nailing them is crucial for a successful, timely delivery. The easiest way of achieving that is becoming good at time tracking, for the data collected highlights the current status and the areas that can be improved. Additionally, it provides insights to build more accurate forecasts moving forward and continuously optimise the process as you go. All in all, it enables you to make informed decisions aimed at your goals as opposed to gambling with guestimations.
However, traditional means of time tracking fall short in efficiency, given today’s high demands and unrealistic time frames. Manually processing timesheets exposes you to a high risk of errors, which may bring on a plethora of issues with both clients and employees. Additionally, it’s time-consuming and unnecessarily complicated when working with billable hours with differentiating rates. Digital time tracking tools address both of these concerns by automating tasks such as time recording, data transfer, and rate calculations.
How efficient is your time tracking? We think it’s time to upgrade.