Planning and Time Tracking to Succeed with Your Projects
Time is one of the most important control parameters in project management. The detailed recording of services and working hours not only enables better budgeting and planning, but also serves as a sound basis for decision-making in all phases of the project.
Planning for Success
Projects often get out of hand, especially in today’s complex and dynamic IT world. An analysis by the management consultancy McKinsey shows that budgets for IT projects are exceeded on average by 45 percent. The reasons for this can be varied. Sometimes projects fail because of communication. They are often too complex and poorly planned. However, an unrealistic budget and time planning can often lead to failure. Modern time tracking solutions from the cloud, as they are now available in countless variants, promise to remedy this. They offer themselves as a better alternative to the annoying and error-prone time tracking with Excel. Project teams are enabled to track their working hours conveniently and in detail, to bill them professionally and to evaluate them using clear reports. As a result, project managers not only are able to create more cost transparency, but also more trust towards project members and stakeholders.
Cost Transparency
If you want to implement your projects on time and on budget, you cannot only rely on your intuition when planning work and calculating costs, you also need precise data. If, for example, you set yourself off when budgeting a project that is offered to the customer at a fixed price, in the worst case, the company could even incur losses. Consistent time tracking throughout the project leads to more cost transparency and better cost estimates.
Better Planning
Another advantage that time management brings with it and is directly related to the topic of cost transparency concerns project planning. The services and working hours that have been recorded in projects that have already been completed serve as a sound basis for decision-making when planning future projects. This way, project managers can plan the tasks of the team better and optimize the assessment of the corresponding workload in each project.
Create More Trust
The project client is often not an expert in the specialist area of the service provider and is therefore often difficult to estimate how much work is really involved in developing a website or in fixing a programming error. Thanks to detailed work timesheets and precise service statements, a close relationship of trust can be built between the client and the service provider.
More Flexible Work Arrangements
Time tracking can also be useful for internal projects within a company. For example, to create trust between management and project employees or to implement more flexible work modalities such as remote teams or home office – as is increasingly desired by employees. With the help of working time reports, which show all hours worked by individual employees, management can check at any time whether the agreed working hours are actually being met.
Conclusion
The precise tracking of working hours and services sets the basis for realistic project budgeting, cost estimates, price and cost calculations and thus for professional project planning. Through the precise tracking and analysis of the services and working hours performed with the help of a modern time tracking solution for companies, projects can be better guided to the goal, that is, on time and on budget.
