Time and Resource Management

Successful completion of tasks depends on balancing available resources and demands. Leaders must carefully identify priorities, prevent resource overload, and facilitate flexible completion times, and maximize value delivery.

Time and resource management is about transparency, allowing managers to see, monitor and get what they need to deliver projects. It also allows you to minimize idle time and overuse of resources. With a comprehensive view of work and resources, managers can schedule, plan and manage resources more effectively, aligning them with the right projects at the right time.

By understanding the disadvantages of not having resource management, it is easy to see its significance. Without the right data, managers have little control over their projects and tasks.

The following are common challenges in time and resource management:

1. Complex classification

Challenge:

An employee can spend multiple hours a week on different types of activities, such as strategic planning, project activities, customer service, review, recruitment, training, administration, corporate social responsibility, etc. These hours can even include paid and unpaid holidays, paid overtime, compensatory overtime and unpaid overtime. When filling out timesheets, employees pay part of their attention to billable and unbilled time. If the timesheet system does not capture the above complexities, employees are prone to making mistakes while filling out timesheets.

Solution:

Timesheet allows organizations to customize different time types and policies, ensuring accuracy and simplifying time tracking. The system enables managers to use it according to the methods and rules required by the organization. It automatically brings out relevant data (such as activity name, time and the working time assigned by employees) according to the planning data of employees’ projects and tasks, and generates timesheets. It is easy for employees to fill in and analyze timesheets, thereby saving a lot of time.

2. Track billable and non-billable time

Challenge:

When it comes to time, not all time is created equal. Managers want employees to focus on billable time so managers can keep profit margins high and administrative costs low. But when managers cant see at a glance where and how employees are spending and tracking their time, the balance between billable and non-billable time can start tipping in the wrong direction.

Solution:

Timesheet provides real-time visibility to improve management insight. Managers have instant visibility into employee timesheets and instantly see how many billable and non-billable hours they have. This insight gives managers the opportunity to make proactive decisions at the moment, helping employees track their billable and non-billable time more accurately while saving valuable time.

3. Miss mistakes that cost revenue

Challenge:

Without real-time visibility into your employees’ time, you have no way of knowing if critical time has been missed or misreported, resulting in lost time or even time theft and lost revenue that drains your project budget. Mistakes happen and lead to lost profits when you don’t have the right tools to catch and correct them.

Solution:

Immediate notifications and alerts are the keys to spotting errors before they become a problem, which are exactly what managers get from  Timesheet. Its advanced validation ensures that you can approve timesheets and make quick corrections anytime, anywhere. It also enables managers to handle submissions and approvals more efficiently, so you can always meet deadlines with fast and accurate timesheets.

4. Deadlines, planning and resource skills

Challenge:

Resource capacity involves finding and effectively managing available resources to deliver projects within your time and budget constraints. If you don’t know how to measure the resource capacity of your organization’s projects and tasks, your organizational efficiency may suffer - you may have too many employees assigned to some tasks, while other employees may be overworked, with most projects and tasks under-resourced, leading to quality issues in projects and tasks, or even lost customers.

Solution:

Timesheet’s resource database has all resource skills and available time data. It can extrapolate future capacity (quantity and skills) needs of future projects, allowing you to plan resources according to the projects’ resource requirements. The system also provides powerful resource search based on skills and available time, enabling you to allocate resources efficiently.

5. Ability to quickly and precisely reallocate resources

Challenge:

Sometimes, no matter how much planning and preparation you do in advance, problems can arise. Project roadblocks may occur at any point in the project life cycle, from stakeholders changing their minds to realizing that you don’t have enough resources to complete the project, so managers need the ability to quickly and precisely reallocate resources.

Solution:

Timesheet allows you to timely know the occurrence of resource conflicts, and to quickly search and reallocate resources with appropriate skills in the resource database, which is automatically updated in real time and provides accurate resource data, making search and redeployment easier.