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HOW DAILY TIME SHEETS KEEP PROJECT MANAGERS UP TO DATE- AND FIRMS STRONG AND PROFITABLE Chet Shuman and Wood Clodfelter "Send in your time sheets today!" say the weekly notices. And most employees dread the exercise. Time sheets have always been necessary but, until recently, the employee and administrative burden of weekly, much less daily, reporting outweighed the benefits for many firms. Today, with computers on every desktop and most of them linked to central databases, administrative effort is virtually zero and employee time is minimal. So what about the benefits to project managers? A close look at one firm suggests how most would benefit from the daily discipline. Project managers at Mock, Roos & Associates, Inc. in West Palm Beach, Florida, find the benefits of keeping up to date on a daily basis are tremendous. Mock-Roos, founded in 1954 , is an engineering and surveying firm with 60 employees. Specializing in environmental, land development, and water resource engineering, the firm is helping South Florida Water Management District restore the Everglades habitat as part of a multi-million dollar project. Mock-Roos has been using daily time sheets since the early 1950’s. In those early years, the time sheets were completed and submitted manually. But since Mock-Roos switched to Harper and Shuman’s CFMS accounting and project management system in the mid-1980s, all employees have been using software developed at Mock-Roos to fill out time sheets on their desktop computers and submit them electronically every day. (See Figure 1 below.)
Like many companies today, Mock-Roos has linked all the desktop computers together in a local area network so that information flows are streamlined and immediate. A central server handles updates and manages communication flows. While computerized timesheets are valuable all by themselves, in a networked environment the benefits are even greater. (See Figure 2 below.) Computerized time sheets in a networked system:
1. Eliminate redundant data entry. 2. Minimize transcription errors. 3. Let employees pick project task, phase and activity codes from lists, minimizing inaccurate entry. 4. Include a space for "notes" which makes it easy to add comments to each item. 5. Make it easy for employees to enter data and submit forms electronically in a few minutes time at the end of each day. EMPOWER PROJECT MANAGERS... But even before electronic time sheets, Mock-Roos found reasons to ask all project employees to submit a daily record of their time. That’s because the senior management at Mock-Roos believes strongly in empowering project managers by giving them access to all project information on a routine and almost ‘real time’ basis. Dale Zimmerman, President and Principal Owner of Mock-Roos, is the driving force behind the company’s commitment to project management status reporting. He believes that project managers will do a better job for clients and will also manage projects more profitably for the firm if they can see what happened the day before. Even when project managers are away from the office and at client meetings, they can get around to each project worker’s "desk" to see how they are doing. By dialing in via the Internet, they can check project status wherever they are. When project managers at Mock-Roos ask for more project information their requests are responded to quickly- - but not sending a printed report with the requested information. Instead, the new information becomes a part of an on-line report the manager can access himself. Mock-Roos project managers like Robin Petzold are signed on to this way of managing because of its financial benefits. As Petzold puts it, "We’re in the business of making money. We just happen to be engineers and surveyors." He looks at reports of project data every day but rarely prints out any paper. Instead, he says, "I look at this stuff so frequently that I notice the changes quickly. I don’t have to spend much time analyzing it." Petzold has 8:00 a.m. staff meetings every Monday morning. The staff comes in with complete budget/project data. He wants to know about cost overruns and completion problems ahead to time. Usually, he’s already reviewed timesheets through the previous Friday so he’s pretty well informed at the outset. Then the meeting can focus on productive issues like getting the resources that may be needed to avoid a crisis or developing a plan to communicate the cost of change orders to clients. "A few minutes every day helps us avoid a crisis every month." says the outspoken Mr. Petzold. "We never have to make time transfers and move things around at the end." CUSTOMERS BENEFIT Of course, many project managers aren’t this disciplined. There are engineers who only want to do engineering, architects who only want to design. They don’t want to fool with financial management. Here are just a few things to keep in mind. 1. Projects that are on track have lower overall costs. 2. The quality of engineering is higher when project managers don’t have to drop what they’re doing to manage a cost control crisis. 3. Necessary changes can be incorporated more frequently so the project is always "refreshed" with new and accurate information. Forward planning is more meaningful and valuable. 4. Projects have greater continuity because managers can check in from remote locations and pass on reports to new team members. SO WILL ADMINISTRATORS Not only do project managers and customer benefit from daily time sheet reporting, but administrative effort is dramatically reduced. Many firms try to send out all client invoices on the same day or in the same week, a period referred to as "Hell Week" by most accounting departments. During this time, everyone especially in accounting, is scrambling to collect timesheets and expenses, close books, generate invoices, etc. In contrast, Mock-Roos has always used a "rolling" billing schedule. By staggering the invoices, sending each client’s on its own schedule, the accounting staff can be kept small. Mock-Roos is a $5 million firm but has only one full-time and one part-time person on the accounting staff. Bills can be generated for work incurred as recently as the day before invoicing. DAILY TIME SHEETS, THE KEY TO BETTER PROJECT MANAGEMENT To sum up, daily time sheets are the key to keeping managers up to date on projects- - and this is the key to better project management. Everyone benefits- - project managers who are empowered to do a better job, customers who are kept informed of project status and budget, and administrative staff who don’t have to endure "Hell Week" every month. Of course, employees who can easily enter time sheets and send them electronically from their desktops will find it easy to comply with the corporate directive: (See Figure 3 below.) Send in your time sheets today!
Chet Shuman is the President of Harper and Shuman, Inc., a Cambridge, MS firm specializing in computer-based financial information systems for the architectural, engineering, and environmental services professions. He may be reached at (617) 492-4410. Wood S. Clodfelter is the President of Andelain Softworks, Ltd., a consulting firm based in Jupiter, FL. The firm specializes in software development, the design and implementation of multi-platform networks, and the creation of graphical information systems. He may be reached at (561) 744-7380. Return to the List of Articles Return to the Association for Project Managers Main Page Email the Association for Project Managers
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