Project Management Blog

Business is of any type but they all want proper management. Project management software is necessary for maintaining records. It includes many things like collaboration software, resource allocation, cost control, team prioritize, chatting with clients and many more. It defines your company's goals and makes projects plans. It gives you the idea of overall expensive and helps you to control and rectify them whenever necessary. It provides updated information to all your team members and your clients regarding all the level of the project.

With the help of project management software you can talk to your team member as well as your clients on a single platform without any difficulty which saves your valuable time. Through this you can manage your meetings, initiate fast communication and take important decisions. Scheduling is also one of the tasks of project management software where it can create deadlines, scheduling people to work on various task and provide information what resources are required by people to accomplish the tasks. This will indirectly increase the performance of your team members and business.

Time tracking is also an important part of business. It provides you information regarding how much time you spend on one project so that you can use your rest of time on other projects which results maximum increase in your productivity. It can manage all the records of employee's which include their attendance, how much time an employee can spend on one project etc. Time tracking is basically used to analyze your team member as well as performance of your business. It ca easily track and manage your entire team time. All your business depends upon planning and proper management.

When you are too worried about the number of bids you receive and what you win, and you do not stop to think what the total cost is that goes into the labor, more than likely, you are spending more than you need to. Most of the time, the job that becomes the most profitable is the larger one. However, there are always smaller maintenance work that can end up being just as or even more profitable. Of course, you may end up spending a longer time checking over your bookkeeping, but you can save time by using programs that track job costs, accounting issues, payroll, revenue, hourly rates and even your accounts receivable. This makes the process of job costing much easier and with less aggravation. The knowledge you will learn will help in making your business much easier to manage, as well as help increase profits.

Bidding and winning on a job that involves higher labor may generate a larger income, but answer some questions before deciding that smaller and simpler maintenance jobs aren't as profitable as the bigger ones. You may find that they are well worth taking.

1.How many workers are employed in my company, and how many hours every week are they working?
2.What is the total amount of weeks every year that are actually spent working? (Remember to keep in mind that not all workers work during a fire or flood.)
3.How is the business doing in profits, and what are my goals for future profits?

As an example: If you have 10 laborers who are working 40 hours a week each, making $12.00 an hour, your total output in payroll will come to $4,800.00. This doesn't include any added health benefits that you pay out, or any extras, like paid lunch. If your workers work 28 weeks from each year, this adds up to a yearly payroll of $182,400. Think about it in these terms, if you have not already.

If a job that you take will be paying just $600,000, you'll end up spending about 1/3 of your potential profit on payroll alone. When the end of the year rolls around, after you have tallied all of the costs, you may see that the job could have been accomplished using only seven guys, meaning an extra $54,720 could have been deposited into your bank account. Hindsight is always 20/20, but finding this out at the end of the job can really be irritating. On larger jobs such as these, it is very possible to spend more than you need on materials because you have miscalculated your costs and needs because of the enormity of the job. For this reason, considering taking smaller maintenance work is a good idea. That way, if you overpay, it will probably be towards labor instead of the materials.

When you accept maintenance jobs, you will usually be able to predict the need for materials and the cost of labor. For example, a pool cleaning job performed the month before will basically cost the same this month, so you will know just the right amount of equipment that one guy will need for the job. By carefully tracking the man-to-hour rate for every smaller job, maintenance jobs can actually turn into a profitable experience.

Carefully working out this type of rate will be beneficial to your companies profit margin. When you have this information figured out before you bid, you will be able to bid with better accuracy. Keep in mind that this rate doesn't actually tell you the jobs that will make money. Instead, it is a simple tool that will help you guide your bidding so that you bid with better accuracy, as well as help you prevent waste in both labor and materials.

This easy formula can be applied to help get you started: Calculate the amount of man to hours to date, divided by the Gross Revenue the job has brought in to date. This will show you what the actual man to hour rate for each job amounts to. When you know this, it lets you see the areas in which that job is more profitable. And example is this: If one employees puts in six hours of landscaping time, and you calculate the man to hour rate at $24.40, while another employee takes three hours to plant and his man to hour rate comes in at $23.30, you will be able to see the difference. While employee number two is a bit less expensive than the first, he is taking less time to work. Therefore, scheduling two different jobs planting rather than one job landscaping may be more profitable for your company.

Remember that the note of “to date” is also a factor in this equation. To keep your job costs efficient, you have to work at it on a continual basis. While it may seem time-consuming, it is important to stay afloat of just how many materials you need and the labor you will require to do the job. Look at it this way- when you make dinner and end up with a large amount of leftovers, is it practical to make a huge dinner again the next night? Of course not, that is just a a waste of good food. Not planning carefully can ruin any event, as well as your business, so take the time and energy your company deserves to make sure this doesn't happen.

To sum it up, take all of the guessing out of your bidding. While many big jobs will of course make a large profit for your company, small maintenance jobs will be able to give fast and easy cash. It is your job to figure out each job cost each time. This way, you will not order too many materials or allot too much labor time, or vice versa. When you do a good job with smaller maintenance projects, you have the chance of building up a repeat customer base, especially when word of mouth gets around that you have a great company and hard working employees. In many cases, you can expect a higher profit margin, because you will be able to predict with more accuracy the labor and materials that you need to set aside for the property and the job. Remember, hindsight doesn't need to be 2/20, foresight can be just as good. Bigger projects does not always mean better.

Experts say that up to 90% of a project manager’s time is spent on communication either with stakeholders, project team, suppliers or upper management within the organization. That volume speaks about the importance of communication to any project. Experienced project managers can relate to this, when communications is done properly, the project is more likely to achieve its objectives.

Easy formula! Not really. Managing communication is one of the most challenging tasks for a project manager. Daily, you might receive and send hundreds or thousands of emails and IM messages. Some issues start on email but get concluded on IM or vice versa. Keeping track of communication, and most importantly the sequence and relation between messages is really a hectic process.

A proper tool should be available to help. Ironically, available project management applications overlook this fact. However, they significantly concentrate on scheduling and reporting, which make them not of great help in this matter. Relying on web 2.0 applications to enhance collaboration and communication was introduced as what is called Project Management 2.0. However, the down side is that you still have to rely on too many applications e.g. twitter, email, IM…..etc. There is no real integration between different applications especially email and IM.

So what exactly we are looking for as project managers? What are the characteristics of the tool that will help manage communications at ease? I think we want the option to communicate in real-time, but also the ability to communicate at our leisure at times. We want a “passive-aggressive” method of communication. Passive communication is when you are just listening, not waiting for nor expecting a prompt response i.e. email, while aggressive communication is about getting a response promptly i.e. IM. We want both approaches in a unified tool.
Wave! Yes Google Wave is the answer. Google Wave is both a platform and a new communication standard. A wave is:

* Equal parts; conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more. A wave can be embedded in a web page as well
* Shared; any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback; anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. You can send to everyone in the wave or select a subset of users.
* Live; with live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

From project management perspective, you can keep track of all communication and documents related to the project. You can track and follow up on issues till conclusion, you can coordinate with your team members and you can communicate with stakeholders using the same wave, awesome!
It is worth mentioning that Google Wave is still not finalized yet, it has been recently released to a limited group of developers for feedback and bugs reporting. However initial indications promise great potential and a mindset shift in our understanding of communication.
So will Project Management 3.0 be based on Google Wave? Most probably.

No one can doubt that project management software is a great tool to help PMs save a significant amount of time. However, “the tremendous power of project management software can lull young project manager into a false sense of security” (Heerkens, 2002, p 138). As every other software, applications like MS Project are just tools; they do not execute the entire job for the PMs. It is unacceptable to expect a computer to manage the project, it just manages the vast amount of data that large projects require to store (Verzuh, 2003, p 104). Project management software is incapable of “establishing project objectives, define project tasks or dependencies, determine and manage project constraints” (Richman, 2002, p 93). As the significance of having a proper Statement of Requirement becomes more and more apparent, project management software should consciously take a secondary role in a project system since their power can only be exploited when the project is defined correctly. Computers can only help producing wrong plans faster, instead of helping the PM understand the essence of project management: satisfying the stakeholder’s needs.