Necessity of hours tracking?

Charles – thanks for the answer to my previous questions. One more:

It looks like it’s essential for each person responsible for every task associated with a particular project to regularly and accurately input the time that they’ve spent on their task(s) in order for the project tracking for a particular project to work properly. True?

Thanks again.

At present, if you want to use LiquidPlanner for something as precise as billing, you’ll want to have people enter progress (effort since last update), into the “progress” field on the task edit pane (work sub-tab). You could do this for them of course at a status meeting or during 1:1s. In an upcomping release, we will be releasing features that make this tracking process easier for professional service organizations that bill thier clients for work.

The product is best at casual tracking right now (not worring about what day the work got done on). What’s really important, is that people re-estimate, or confirm the remaining work estimate for each task in flight on a regular basis. We make this easy by popping up an orange question mark for all the tasks that should be getting done according to the priority order. If the orange question marks do not match reality, enter zero progress and check the priorities. Doing this will keep your schedule fresh and trustable.

Estimating is the core competency you want to develop in your staff. Most people estimate in ranges that are too narrow and forget to estimate tasks entirely like integration and testing tasks. The Analyize tab helps with this once you get more data in.

www.timexchange.net has some pretty nifty time tracking deals. A combination of the two would be fantastic…

Thanks. Open offer to anyone in the forums – send me your requirements and interests regarding: time tracking, billing, clients, budgets, or workflow. Use mailto:support@liquidplanner.com.