The importance of time tracking in project management

When you start with a project, the initial task is to have a top-level plan. Once that is done, you often move on to preparing the detailed list of activities and incorporate them into your project plan. Now comes the part were resources are allocated to these activities. During the course of your project, modifications to the activities and resources can happen on a regular basis.  Often, one resource will be working on more than one project and tracking of time spent on different activities is vital in many ways.

When it comes to a project manager, it is important to know the hours the resource is putting on different activities. Over a period, the accurate reporting of time by the resource helps the project manager to understand the performance and the average time a  resource takes to complete a particular type of activity.  This information will be extremely useful for the estimation for the next projects, especially if the activities are similar in nature.

The time spent on activities will also come in handy when there is a need for prioritizing an activity or project over another. More over, the proper time entry enables the project manager to see that the time is not exceeding the estimated time, and well in advance mitigate the risks.

Effective time tracking helps also the resources, in order to keep track of their normal work time as well as the overtime they have put in. Without additional steps human resource personal could check the overtime of the resource and compensate for that.

Resources can view their entered time in daily, weekly and Monthly formats. At the end of the month they can submit the time reports to the managers. Once the time report is submitted, the entered time will be locked so further changes are prevented.

Managers and administrators can go through the various reports and monitor the time for various purposes.  The combination of effective project planning, resource allocation to activities and tracking of time in ProjectCoordinator add a lot of value for organizations that are managing multiple projects and resources.