Invest Time Wisely
Time is the most precious resource of all. Learn how to maximize its return on investment.
If you want to know how successful an organization will be, look at how it spends its time.
The 21st century has brought about a host of technologies that have dramatically increased human productivity. From the advent of personal computing to the standardization of cloud-based software, companies now have the tools needed to execute their ideas faster than ever before.
But with this new potential also comes a new obstacle:
Scatterbrain.
Modern organizations struggle to focus their teams. Shiny new objects and endless opportunities lead to either project hopping or decision paralysis.
Since time is money, this lack of focus quickly erodes bottom lines. To remedy this situation, business leaders must begin viewing time as a currency. After all, with each new hire, money is converted into time.
But rarely is time accounted for in the same way as money. Often, businesses struggle to understand where their time is spent.
In order to more wisely invest their time, organizations need to understand three key areas:
- Where their organization’s time is currently spent.
- Which of their past initiatives were most successful.
- And what their upcoming capacity looks like.
Once these three areas are understood, leaders can determine which projects are likely to have a high impact on their business, allocate the appropriate resources to those projects, and align their team around their execution.
By doing so, business leaders will provide more focus for their teams, making the most of their working hours.
Uncover the truth about how time is invested. Keep Track of Your Spending Habits
As investors of time, your company’s managers are given a budget of employee hours to spend each month. Those resources are then spent on various projects, all of which impact your organization’s future. But unlike all of their other investments, rarely do your managers know the exact cost of those employee hours, nor their rate of return.
That’s because the average employee works on multiple projects simultaneously. As such, their managers can only guess as to how their time is actually allocated:
“Is Nitya spending 35% of her time on Project X, or is it only 20%?”
Even though the variance seems small, these innocuous differences quickly add up, distorting their perception of a project’s final cost.
Afterall, how would you feel if your investment portfolio informed you that your rate of return was somewhere between -5% and 10%? It’s likely you wouldn’t find that answer acceptable.
While every leader has an idea of what their team is doing, few hold any notion of exactly how long they’re doing it for. And without a firm grasp of the total time spent on every initiative, project costing is impossible.
That’s why modern organizations must account for their team’s time the same way that they account for all other expenditures. Because without an accurate conception of the costs and returns of their investments, they’ll never be able to intelligently steer their team toward the right work.
With ClickTime, your team will have access to all the tools they need to record every project cost.
How ClickTime Collects Accurate Spend Data
- Flexible Object Hierarchy
- Custom Fields
- Time Entry Oversight
- Convenient Logging
- Automated Reminders
See which projects contribute the most to your bottom line. Identify Your Blue Chip Projects
Once timesheet data has been collected, you’ll see the true investment you’ve made into each of your initiatives. Our platform allocates employee costs across the projects they work on. This way, you’ll always have an up-to-date, accurate view of your total project expenditures.
As the real cost of your projects is revealed, you’ll gain a whole new perspective on the efficacy of your investments. You may find that projects which took many calendar months to complete were actually relatively inexpensive. Or, you’ll see that projects which were executed quickly had all hands on deck, racking up quite the price tag.
With an accurate, objective view of your costs, you’ll now be ready to analyze the impact each project had on your organization.
The project analysis process will look slightly different for every organization. For businesses who bill clients for the services they provide, ClickTime automatically calculates project profitability. Our platform also allows you to customize billing rates, create fixed-bid projects, and build retainer billing models.
Seeing each projects’ profitability next to one another will allow you to spot trends and outliers. In this manner, you’ll quickly identify your blue chip projects.
How ClickTime Spots Blue Chip Projects
- Project Insights
- Cost Rates
- Billing Rates
- Fixed Project Bids
- Overtime
Judiciously allocate time, resources, and spend. Make a Time Investment Plan
Once you’ve identified which types of projects have the greatest impact on your business, it's time to create a time investment strategy. This process will involve three distinct phases, namely: viewing your upcoming resources, estimating project costs and timelines, and allocating resources.
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View Your Upcoming Resources: Your team has current project commitments they’re working on, as well as ongoing “keeping the lights on” tasks to accomplish. Before you can invest their upcoming time, you’ll need to know how many work hours will be available to allocate.
With ClickTime, you’ll know every staff member’s upcoming capacity. Unlike other project time trackers, we have time off tracking built into our system. This allows you to spot upcoming vacations in the project planning phase, ensuring you don’t assign work to an absent employee.
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Estimate Costs and Timelines: After you know which resources you’ll have at your disposal, you can estimate each project’s timeline and budget. To ensure that your estimates are as accurate as possible, you can reference past projects in ClickTime that were similar in scope. The more data you put into the ClickTime platform, the better your forecasts will be.
ClickTime then allows you to create lifetime project budgets. These budgets can be created using dollars, hours, or billings. Since our platform uses live timesheet data, your budgets will be drawn down in real time, helping your project managers prevent overdraw.
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Allocate Your Resources: With a budget crafted, it's then time to allocate your resources. ClickTime allows you to assign employees project hours that will show up in their timesheet dashboard. This way, they’ll always know what projects they should be working on, and how many hours they have left to complete their tasks.
With a time investment plan created, your project managers will then be able to nimbly execute their work. And as costs and billings are accumulated in real time, the ClickTime platform will keep your executives up-to-date on every project’s status.
How to Invest Your Resources Using ClickTime
- Resource Planning
- Time Off
- Timesheet Dashboard
- Project Lifetime Budgets
Create clear goals and alignment across your organization. Measure Your Rate of Return
When you create a time investment plan, you’re telling your entire organization which projects are important, as well as defining what success looks like. This process creates alignment across your team, ensuring that everyone within your business is focused on the same goals.
And with ClickTime’s reporting capabilities, including a suite of BI Analytics tools, you’ll be able to measure the success of your time investments. Our platform allows you to report on every aspect of your team’s effort, from project costs to revenue, employee utilization to overtime expenditures.
Once you’ve crafted the custom reports you need, you’ll be able to quickly view your metrics through executive dashboards and automated email reports. This way, you’ll always have a finger on the pulse of your business.
Start investing your time intelligently today. Make the Most of Your Time
Time is the most precious asset your organization has. By learning how to invest it wisely into your blue chip projects, you’ll increase focus within your organization. And with increased focus will come vast improvements to your bottom line.
Join the thousands of companies investing their time wisely with ClickTime. Start your free trial today.