How to Create Streamlined Timesheet Reporting
Is Streamlined Timesheet Reporting important?
Keeping track of employee hours is an essential part of running any business. However, it is especially important in enterprise project portfolio management. Timesheet reporting shows how much time and resources are being spent on all your projects and programs.
Today, sophisticated timesheet reporting software helps project management offices (PMOs) more efficiently allocate resources. It assists managers in prioritising demand, reducing bottlenecks, and identifying any productivity pain points. These are all areas that might cause project delays or scope creep. In addition, when timesheet data combines with powerful analytical tools, PMO’s can optimise the processes for better project delivery overall.
How Do I Improve My Reporting?
Streamlined timesheet reporting means employees can accurately record their work effort without undue administrative burden. One of the best ways to achieve this is to implement an electronic, cloud-based timesheet system. Such systems eliminate the need for paper-based timesheets and reduce manual data entry. This results in significant time savings and less error.
The timesheet’s interface should be intuitive and user-friendly, letting employees easily log their hours and any other relevant data. Additionally, it should be customisable for different projects, tasks and teams. Ideally, it will integrate with any other software tools used by the business (such as project timelines and accounting systems).
With well-designed electronic timesheet recording in place timekeeping is expedited so managers can focus on key aspects of PPM strategy.
What Does Streamlined Timesheet Reporting Do for My Business?
Accurate Timesheet data improves project resource management by:
- Increase Visibility and Accountability: Timesheet reporting helps measure productivity across the organisation.
- Help Calculate Resource Use and Costs: Analytical tools use timesheet data to provide up-to-date calculations of ‘Earned Value’ and effort. This helps managers make more accurate projections of resources for future project proposals.
- Strategically Aligns and Prioritises Projects: Timesheet reporting integrates with cost management, benefit management, and other tools. This kind of visibility helps to guide project prioritisation. It can help align project approvals with strategic goals and assist decision-makers to focus on strategic value.
- Improve Real-Time Monitoring and Evaluation: Streamlined timesheet reporting allows up-to-the-minute, real-time monitoring of project performance. This allows for rapid forecast revisions and strategic interventions during project delivery to prevent issues from escalating.
Skills Assessments at Scale
When managing multiple projects, programs, or portfolios, the ability to assess what skill sets are available at any one time is vital. Leading PPM solutions like PMO365 enable you to plan for current projects and anticipatefuture requirements. It also lets you model ‘what-if scenarios’ where plans are suddenly forced to change, for example.
With advanced modelling and real-time reporting and dashboards, PMO365 provides an accurate picture of who and how many units of labour are required at each stage of each project’s delivery. PMO365’s timesheet reporting integrates with all your enterprise software to give accurate projections of requirements.
Furthermore, if an issue arises in one project or program that requires the immediate deployment of additional resources, PMO365 assists managers to instantly determine how much skill is available to help.
Next Level Enterprise Project Portfolio Management
PMO365’s Timesheets App is part of a comprehensive and tailored project management solution built from over 15 years’ experience in PPM for industry across Europe, Australia and the USA.
When combined with PMO365’s other PPM components, it provides a complete and accurate picture of the entire project portfolio. It can also be configured to integrate with virtually any Microsoft and non-Microsoft PPM application for optimum efficiency and strategic value.
Find out more about our Timesheets App and see how PMO365 will take your project resource management to the next level.
PMO365: The Project Management Office on your Microsoft 365 cloud.
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.