Working hours are counted, but do you really know how to use them?

When a company really manages working hours, it can not only calculate the project cost more accurately, but also have other very important applications:

1. Establish employee competency baseline.

How much time employees in a certain position spend doing a certain job can directly reflect the ability of employees in that position in many cases. After statistical analysis of multiple employees and multiple projects, an enterprise can analyze the average ability required by employees in a certain position, which is called the ability baseline, so as to continuously improve the ability of employees and thus enhance the overall ability of the enterprise.

2, the basis of enterprise resource management

When a project manager applies for adding people or recruiting employees, how can an enterprise judge whether it really needs it? What is the basis? The answer is: empirical data accumulated through working hours management.

For example, if a department has 10 employees, the total effective working hours of the department should be at least 300 employees per week according to 6 hours per day and 5 working days per week. If the working hours statistics are less than this standard, it means that the workload of the department is not full, and it is necessary to strengthen the work efficiency of personnel. If the statistics of working hours have exceeded this standard, it shows that this department has been working hard to work overtime and overload. At this time, the enterprise may have to consider increasing the staffing for the department.

3. Optimize the manpower allocation of the project

As the basis of enterprise resource management, working hours have a prerequisite: working hours statistics are considerable and accurate. This requires that the project report should not be ostentatious, but should actually report the time according to the work. The granularity of reporting work should be reduced as much as possible. It is best to break down the project into WBS and report the work according to specific tasks. For mature projects, task-based reporting can also summarize the working hours of the same type of tasks, which is very helpful for analyzing and optimizing the manpower allocation of tasks.

4. Realize EVM management.

The implementation of man-hour management is the premise for the company to introduce earned value management, which is conducive to linking the project plan, cost and progress through earned value, and very intuitively monitoring and predicting whether the existing and future costs of the project are overspent and whether the progress is delayed. When evaluating project performance, enterprises can also use EVM management to compare projects horizontally and decide the rewards and punishments of project managers or teams.

Therefore, man-hour management is only the beginning and foundation for enterprises to realize an efficient project management system. On the basis of implementing working time management (please refer to the previous article for how to implement it), it is more important to make good use of working time to improve team efficiency and management ability.