When I walked in to my PMO Manager\u2019s office and sat down for our one-on-one, I was not expecting to hear the one sentence I never wanted to hear. \u201cWe\u2019re going to start tracking project time.\u201d Nooooo! My boss tried to make it positive by listing benefits. Yes, it would be nice to have historical data, but it\u2019s not necessary for me to be able to do my job. And yes, it would be nice to see just how much time my project team members are spending on their work; but I don\u2019t need that much detail. I\u2019ve never done it before, and certainly don\u2019t need to start now. As soon as I promised my boss I would give it the old college try, he informed me this is now part of my performance goals. Great\u2026<\/p>\n
Week 1:<\/strong> I had no idea that I would need to block off my entire Friday afternoon just to fill out this timesheet. Adding a note in to each entry takes time and it\u2019s tough to think back to exactly what I did during that hour or two. My team members started complaining to me that it was taking up time that they could be spending on their project work. Not sure if I want my team spending time on filling out their timesheets when they could be using that time to get actual project work done.<\/p>\n Week 2:<\/strong> I started taking a few minutes each day to record what I worked on, instead of waiting until the end of the week. It doesn\u2019t take up as much of my day this way. I saw a timesheet report that showed how much time each of my team members are tracking against the project work. It\u2019s actually pretty interesting to see what was estimated compared to how much time they actually spent on it. But I’m not sold yet.<\/p>\n Week 3:<\/strong> I showed my project timesheet report to the project\u2019s business sponsor, and she loved it. What a fantastic and unexpected surprise! She was very impressed that we are collecting this information and asked if she could share it with her larger team. We were also able to have a great conversation as a result of reviewing the report together. I have been asking her for more time from the team members that are assigned to the project, but she had said that they are too busy on other work. Now she can see that we will not meet the deadline if we continue at the current allocation level, and has approved them to spend 100% of their time on my project until it is done. Oh, happy day!<\/p>\n