Hi Douglas,

I fully agree with an earlier comment to use the planning packages for scheduling and control and use an accounting package for invoicing and employees’ pay.

However, the best method (IMO) for project control is the regular use of the Earned Value (EV) Reports from within the planning package. This means that ’Actuals’ need to be reported at least on a weekly basis.

Micro Planner encourages this approach. Micro Planner offers standard time sheet report templates and a report wizard tool to adjust them for a particular project. Time sheets can be printed to a .pdf and then emailed/distributed to the employees.

Or if there are remote groups of resources then the local data can be captured on a local copy of Micro Planner and the progress can then be fed to the parent project file via the Internet.

By giving the local work groups their own licensed copy of Micro Planner, they are empowered to not only update their progress, but to locally analyze the impact of their progress and make adjustments for their own time sheets for the following work period and also to see the activity horizon over the next four eight or 12 week period.

This approach would save a huge amount of time in a central PSO, as 85% of the up-dating was achieved locally leaving 15% of the work for fine-tuning, and reporting to the Project Board.

We need to think carefully about what it is that needs to be achieved and then design a system for its achievement.

My golden rule in life is to report data once and then use it many times. (Fewer errors, less work, less time).

So if the progress data needs to be captured in Micro Planner for EV reporting etc. then simply set up tables to export the ’actuals’ in say .csv or .xml format into the accounting packages.

Cheers
John

Timesheeting is a two edge saw.

If you setup the system/procedure/processes/people correctly then it will give you power to manage project resource+claims+forecasting+++

However, if any components out of the system/processes/people is fail, it will becomes a nightmare.

Having said all that what I recommend the most important step to utilise Timesheet is asking what do you want to get out of the timesheet processes.
Just to get people weekly pay
To capture progress info
To capture actual hrs
To forecast hrs
To manage key resources
For contractural dispute/claims
For high level resource management
Different answers combination will need different setup

HTH

Alex - Back to work

Hello everybody,
Timesheet analysis is very easy through Resource Assignment View. It does not take so long comparing forecasts and Actuals (dynamic analyis through Group & Sort choices).

Kindest regards.

Hi Jerry,

Yes, you can tick off steps in the timesheet browser, but the snag is that you can also just as easily "untick" these steps; so you need to establish some discipline in your user community. ("Done" means "done", for instance)

If you set your activities to physical % complete and set the project to calculate the activity % complete based on steps, it will show progress based on the steps ticked off by the timesheet users.

Adding and removing steps is too good to be true I’m afraid.

Local Primavera dealers can supply you software with a temporary license. Beware, these systems are complex and testing options can take a LOT of time!

H.T.H.

Niek.

Niek,
Very sound advice indeed, if you wish to use the module, couldn’t agree more.

Andy

Hello,

I am not a specialist of the Timesheet module, but I experienced it ; I think that it could be parameterized, so that it is not necessary to get the correct nominative resource known to allow the timesheet on the task.
For instance, in the case of rework by a production team : at the moment you schedule, you do not often know which personn of the team will do the work. So you can load the task with ’generic resource’ of the team. If you only permit to nominative resources to declare timesheets on the tasks where they are loaded, it will quicky be a nightmare for you.

Is there anyone who knows more about it ?

Very valid point Andrew!

The use of timesheets puts a serious quality constraint on the schedule, because it needs to accurately reflect the work that is being carried out. Any discrepancy between real life and what’s in the schedule will immediately emerge when people try to enter their time. The more detailed the schedule is, the higher the probability that it’s wrong.

In my experience, you need full-time schedulers to keep up with reality and less granular schedules to avoid excessive maintenance.

Last but not least the schedule must be based on a solid plan, and a decent planning cycle where key contributors have actively participated. Time tracking systems are very vulnerable so you need buy-in from your key resources to make it work...

H.T.H.

Niek.

Jerry,
I am currently employed by a company that uses the timesheet module and we suffer on a daily basis by the unachievable balance between timesheets and schedule detail.

Constantly we have people ringing, e-mailing for a code to book there time too, only to find out that they were not originally assigned to that task/activity.

If I were you, I’d make sure that you understand the implications of using the module and have a very detailed set of instructions laying down the timelines you need to work from.

Each week I need to go back in time up to 12 months of weekly timesheets to approve those sheets that were not submitted on time. Understand that we suffer from a large amount of work and not many people to do it and therefore as priorities change on our projects so do the resource assignments on the activities to allow people to book their time to the correct activity.

Then we get to the people who just plain don’t care about the timesheet module and never submit a timesheet. Then we deal with 2 levels of non sequential approval, meaning the Responsible manager of the project or the WBS element needs to approve the hours booked to the activities associated to them, and then the timesheet approval manager needs to approve the full timesheet for the individual resource.

We also struggle with a cost tool called CHEOPS which we integrate with and it works purely on cost accounts and for some stage reason the company has decided to use the cost accounts at the activity resource assignment level and not simply at the activity as a whole or even a cost account level (p.s. they don’t know what a cost account is with respect to project management definition)

Also I hear just recently that even Primavera itself here in Australia are not recommending the timesheet module anymore due to the potential for overhead/man-hours associated with using it.

In closing I would suggest that Primavera is a scheduling tool (somewhere to hold your activity timeline and logic) and you should use a separate tool to do your invoicing and project costs/expenses, and possibly timesheets or even a third tool that captures hours against cost accounts.


Andy