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How to Encourage Your Team to do Timesheets

Make it easy for your team to record their time with these 5 simple steps.

Step 1: Explain why you are collecting data
People are more likely to complete their timesheets if they know what you are doing with the information. Explain how it helps you manage the project more effectively. You can tell them that it provides really useful information to validate the estimates and it ensures that everyone is working on the right things at the right times. You can adapt the project schedule depending on how quickly tasks are being done.

Step 2: Make it easy
One of the reasons why people don't complete timesheets is because they are difficult to fill in. They don't have to be. Choose an online project management tool that allows everyone on the team to complete their timesheet information with a few clicks. Look for one that has a 'copy previous week' button like the one in thisTime Tracking Software to save even more time.

Step 3: Link the data to the project plan
Ideally your timesheet data should link automatically to the project plan so team members don't have to complete two sets of information. They will feel as if the software is actually helping them to do their job instead of asking them to fill in lots of forms for seemingly no purpose.

Step 4: Share the reports
Time tracking reports allow you to see if your project is running on time or if you are behind schedule. These can be really useful tools to help you manage the project successfully. You can also see how much time has been spent on the project to date. Showing the reports to your team members can help reinforce the message that their time sheet data is very valuable and that it is worth completing the time sheets.

Review the reports before you share them with the team as you don't want confidential information to be available publicly. That shouldn't be a problem for most projects but it is worth checking before you send the information to everyone.

Step 5: Review your estimates
Finally, use your time sheet information to review your estimates on the project. If a task is taking longer than expected, this is a great time to change your project schedule as appropriate. Use the historical data from time sheets to better predict the future. After all, if a task took longer than expected, chances are that your estimate was a bit optimistic and you'll need to review it for next time.

Explain to your team why you have asked them to do time sheets and make use of all the functionality in ProjectManager.com to make completing them a breeze.

Why Project Managers Need a Risk Log

January 25, 2013

Risk management is one of the areas of project management that gets overlooked, often because it can be quite tedious to do. However, you do risk management every day in your non-work life. What’s the risk of rain, shall I take an umbrella? What if we get stuck in a traffic jam? Let’s take an alternative route and pack some snacks and a drink for the car. What if the children are bored while we are out? Put a couple of extra toys in your bag. We manage risks like this all the time, working out the most appropriate mitigating actions and putting plans in place to achieve them.

So, if we do risk management all the time, why do so many project managers fail to have a good risk log? Especially as they are so easy to put together, once you have an initial meeting to discuss risk with your project team. Here are 5 reasons why you need a risk log on your project.

1. A Risk Log Helps You Plan

Having a risk log helps you schedule activities in the most appropriate order. For example, most risks that you identify will require some action to mitigate them. Mitigating actions are those that help you avoid the risk happening in the first place. In the case of trying to avoid rain, there’s not much you can do about that, but if you want to avoid traffic jams, you could take an alternative route. That would be a mitigating action.

On your project, you will have to plan the mitigating actions. Some may be quite quick and easy to do. Others may require a lot of planning and doing and that will take team members away from the other project tasks. You will have to take this into account when you plan the activities for your team – don’t expect them to be able to manage their ‘normal’ project tasks from the schedule and take on risk mitigation activities as well.

Use your risk log to identify the mitigating actions required and schedule them into your online project management tool so you that have a complete picture of the work required for the team.

2. A Risk Log Helps You Prioritize

One of the functions of a risk log is to capture all the risks to the project in one place. That’s great, but you also have to prioritize them. Which risks are going to cause you the greatest pain on the project?

Rank your risks in priority order so you know which ones to focus on first. You can also prioritize by date, making sure that you spend time on the risks that were identified early in the project. The longer they are a project risk, the more chance there is that they will interrupt the project somehow!

Remember that risks come and go, so when a risk has passed, take it off the log, or at least mark it as closed. This allows you to focus on the risks that are still a threat – don’t waste time prioritizing actions to address things that have already been and gone.

3. A Risk Log Helps You Budget

Your mitigating actions are likely to incur costs, even if it is just the cost of the project team working on them. Look through your risk log and work out how much it will cost to manage each risk effectively. Then you can add these costs to your project budget.

Of course, you might find that it is too expensive to manage all the risks in the way that you want, which is where your prioritization activity comes in. Distribute your available funds to the risks that have the highest priority.

See if you can identify positive risk as well. These are risks that don’t cause problems but do deliver benefits, such as the additional revenue that would result in delivering early, if you could ship your product ahead of the forecasted project end date. This type of risk could have a positive implication for your project or business case.

4. A Risk Log Helps You Allocate Responsibility

Another feature of a risk log is the risk owner. This should be a separate column or field in the log, and it should always have a name in! Someone has to take responsibility for managing the risk, even if they don’t end up doing all the work themselves.

Make sure all your risks have an owner allocated. Documenting risk ownership in this way can really help people see what they are responsible for. It makes it easier for you to track progress as well, as you will always know who to ask for a status update. Try to avoid having yourself as the risk owner for all the risks – while it is sometimes appropriate for the project manager to take responsibility for managing a risk or two, you are likely to have a lot of other things to do and you can’t actively manage them all. It can also be a good opportunity for a more junior member of the team to take a degree of responsibility, so use the chance to delegate if you can.

5. A Risk Log Helps You Manage the Project

Finally, your risk log will help you manage the project. Risk is inherent in all the projects we do, but you have a much better chance of success if you identify the potential problems upfront and then work with your team to address them.

Remember that you can’t do risk management alone. It starts with risk identification, and there is no way that you have enough knowledge about all the specialist areas of the project to be able to accurately identify the possible pitfalls. Having a discussion with your team is the best way to identify risk. You can also include a section on risk management in each of your team meetings, so managing the project and the risks becomes inseparable. You’ll have far more chance of getting your project completed efficiently and effectively if you work together to handle risk management.