IT Management Reference Guide

Combating the Year-end Budget Blitz—Part 2: Tracking and Reporting Availability

Last updated Dec 2, 2005.

This segment was written by Tom Cutting.

How do you avoid the end-of-year budget blitz, where project managers are given new projects but not additional resources? The solution is to develop a manageable project schedule and use it to track and report resource availability throughout the life of a project.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed developing a manageable project schedule. Now we will review four progress-tracking steps and show you how to use them to communicate resource usage.

4 Progress Tracking Steps

A schedule that is not maintained is merely wishful thinking. The simplest way to use a Microsoft Project plan is as a checklist, marking tasks off as they are completed. Another method used by some project managers is to arbitrarily assign a percentage complete to the tasks as they are worked on. Unfortunately neither one of these methods allows you to realistically measure progress and forecast against the budget. The reason often given for not tracking at this level is that it is too difficult to manage.

In reality, the hardest part of tracking your project is just making time on a weekly basis to follow a few simple steps. The four steps involved in tracking a project are discussed below.

1. Distribute timesheets. Timesheets, whether electronic or paper-based, are a vital communication tool between you and your team. Timesheets communicate to the team what is assigned to them, when it is due, and how long it will take to complete it. The team uses timesheets to communicate back to you what they worked on, what was completed, what wasn't finished, and how much more time they need.

   If your company does not have a time reporting tool that collects Actuals at a task level for each project, you will need to do it manually. Figure A show a Microsoft Project Plan view of a timesheet with summary tasks displayed. You can print this template and distribute it to your team on a weekly basis. By using the auto-filter feature, you can scroll down the drop down list under the Task Name column to select a specific resource. Tasks assigned only to that individual will display.

   

   Figure A

   Other auto-filtering can be used to trim the number of tasks shown. For example, customizing the "Remaining Work" column to view tasks with more than 0 hours removes all completed tasks. Print and distribute a timesheet for each team member.

   NOTE

   The Microsoft Project Plan linked here contains the Timesheet w/ High Level view used to produce Figure A.

2. Collect actuals and estimates to complete (ETC). Both actual hours and ETC should be collected at the task level. The team members are to report the total amount spent that week on each specific task. They are also to write in the ETC column for the task what they think is needed to complete it.

   Some project managers collect only actual hours and guess at the remaining work or allow the tool to automatically calculate it. Unfortunately, original estimates are never exact. Some will be more, others less. By applying ETC supplied by your team members, you are getting their commitment and increasing the accuracy of your completion dates.

   It is important to ask team members to justify ETCs that extend tasks beyond the original time frames either by hours or dates. The tendency will be to inflate the estimates, especially when you first introduce this concept to the team.

3. Enter the hours. Automated time reporting tools such as Clarity offer the advantage of not having to key the information into the project schedule. But by using the timesheets you collected, even entering the actuals and ETC into the schedule manually will be relatively easy. Use the same view to enter time as the one used to produce the timesheet (Timesheet w/ High Level in Figure A).

   By using the auto-filter on the "Task Name" column to select each resource, you can enter the total time for the week into the corresponding week's column ("A" in figure B) in the scheduling tool. Update the task's "Remaining Work" column ("B" in figure B) with the ETC from the timesheet.

   

   Figure B

4. Adjust the schedule. Armed with realistic information, it is your responsibility to review the schedule and align it with deadlines. If you are fortunate enough to be ahead of schedule you may not need to adjust. If not, you need to know which of the triple constraints are immovable: scope, schedule, or cost. Have a conversation with your sponsor to determine which is the highest priority. The steps you take to adjust the schedule will impact each of these constraints, as illustrated by the three following common methods used:
   • Adding more resources allows both the scope and schedule to remain constant but will increase the cost.
   • Delaying the completion date alters the schedule and may impact the cost but allows the scope to be intact.
   • Removing tasks cuts back on the scope while allowing the cost and schedule to be met.

   Each action will have a reaction, so consider the impacts.

Communicating Resource Availability

The project schedule is a priceless communications vehicle. By maintaining your schedule, you can quantitatively demonstrate your progress and staff workload. Instead of weeks and weeks of listing deliverables as "90% completed," you can state, "we have spent 270 hours with 32 more to finish it."

The same is true with resource availability. The hours forecasted are based on direct feedback from those that will perform the tasks. When combined on a weekly basis, it quickly becomes evident who will be working on weekends (see figure C).

Confidently present the reality check to your management and ask them to help you prioritize the new projects assigned to your over committed team members. If logic is allowed to prevail, this will help you stop the budget blitz and push back against the unrealistic new projects at the end of the year.