Time Tracking in Orangescrum

Amit•February 24, 2020

“Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.” – Jim Rohn.

Take a moment, think deeply about that statement. Almost all spend their lives searching for ways to earn surplus money, but hardly ever, we think about time and its importance, it’s a limited resource!

We all have the same time available that is, 24 hours per day. You can neither store time or borrow it, nor save for later use. You can only decide how to utilize or allocate it, spend it on activities of higherrather than lower values.

When you understand the importance of time, you will also understand the importance of managing your time. Time management is all about a game of choices-projects to pursue, tasks to complete, outcomes to deliver.

Track your Team Work hours with Orangescrum

Try it free

Why Time Tracking is important in Project Management?

Time tracking is extremely important to manage your operations profitably. If a team works on an hourly basis, time tracking helps in adjusting the rate of work. This way, your team can ensure fair payments for the quality and amount of work delivered.

Effective time management allows you to plan your days in such a way that you finish your work with less effort, make the most use of the limited time you’ve got.

Project budgeting is directly dependent on the effort estimates required to fulfil the project objectives. Thus a lot of effort goes into the project planning phase.

Extreme caution is exercised to make as perfect a work breakdown possible to track the minute of the costs associated in meeting the deliverables.

Added pressure from competition demands that we do more with less to innovate, deliver in a timely manner and stay profitable.

If your deliveries aren’t tracked properly, you will always be dependent on guesstimates and human judgement which may prove harmful over time.

“On the other hand, when you specifically know which projects consume how much time, you can quote, deliver and get paid better!”

Benefits of Effective Time Management-

The benefits of time tracking are known since time immemorial, yet we struggle to manage it optimally. Here are some benefits of effective time management:

Achieve what you want, and faster
Deliver work on time
Improve your Work/Life balance
Reduce stress and anxiety
Increase productivity
Data driven planning &forecasting.
Avoid delivery failures & penalties

How does Orangescrum help in time tracking?

Orangescrum offers a very detailed & simplified time tracking mechanism, so that you can know how your project is progressing in terms of resource, cost & budget instantly.

1. Logging your spent hours for tasks:

Logging spent hoursfor tasks is the best way to track true effort spend & ensure project success.

Productive teams are very mindful of their time tracking practices to improve their performance over time.

Orangescrum allows users to log time in 3 ways-

- Timer
- Time entry
- Timesheet
Using the automated Timer:
- Click Quick Links>Start Timer
- Select specific Project& task from the list.
- You can pause the Timer for a particular Task by clicking It will be added as your break time.
- If it is a billable time, you can check the“Is Billable?”flag,&add notes of the work accomplished on the task.
- At the end Click “Save” and you are done!

Using Time Entry:

“Time Entry provides ability to users to provide accurate time log data, that is, you can provide start time, end time & break time for the task.”

- Go to Quick Links>Time Entry
- Select Task from the task list. By default you will see the task list of the current project.
- Select Resource Name from the list and pick Date from the calendar.
- Select Start time, End time&Break time(If you have taken any break while doing the task, then add the break time). Spent Hours will be calculated automatically.
- If it is a billable time, you check the Billable
- Click on + Add Line Item, if you want to log more hours for a different resource or same resource different date or different time for the same task
- Enter notes if any & Click on Save Button to save data.
Using Weekly Timesheet:
- Navigate to Time log> Weekly Timesheet from the left panel.
- By default, you’ll be on the current week starting from Sunday to Saturday & Tasks which you have closed/performed any action (ex. Task modified, updated, added time log, changed assign to, changed due date etc.) will be added to your timesheet.
- Navigate to your tasks and log your spent hours under a particular date/day in HH:MM format.
- To add a new time entry for a task which is not showing in the timesheet, navigate & Click on + Add line item (at bottom of projects column)
- On the Pop-up, select Project and Task, enter time log for each task added to the timesheet.
Using Daily Timesheet:
- Navigate to Time log page from left panel and click Daily Timesheet tab.
- By default, current date will be selected.
- To log time, click on + Add line item to select a Project and Tasks to log time.
- After selecting the Project and Task, entry time under the Hours column with format HH:MM
- Add a Note (optional) to time entries and mark your log time as billable or non-billable as well
- Click on Save to successfully log time for task.

2. Tracking time through timesheet-

Total spent hour of a resource for a particular day in a specific project–

Suppose as a project manager, I would like to see how much total time of the day has been spent by Daniel in LSS Data Migration Project.

Then I can get that report from Daily timesheet of the resource.

I can go to the Daily timesheet, select the resource name from the drop-down and find the total time spent on a particular project and day.

We can see that Daniel has spent 6 hours on 7^th February on LSS Data Migration project.

Total time log spent by a resource in a day–

A reporting manager can see the time log details of his resource on a particular daydirectly from theDaily timesheet.

He just needs to select the Date and Resource name on the timesheet page.

We can see that total 10 hours has been spent by Daniel on 7^th February.

Total weekly time log spent of a resource on a particular task of project–

As project manager, I would like to know the total time log spent on a task in a given week.

I can get that report from the Weekly timesheet. I just have to select the Week and Resource name on the weekly timesheet.

We can see that Daniel has spent total 8 hours from 02 February-8 February.

Total weekly time log data of a user:

Now, if as Daniel’s manager, I want to review the spent hour details across projects and tasks for a particular week –

We can see that Daniel has spent total 44 hours from 02 February-8 February.

3. Time Tracking

Total estimated vs spent hour of a project–

As a project manager, it is really important for me to know if my project is progress on proper track in terms of time.

So tracking the estimated vs spent hours is crucial.

I can just head over to the time log page, select the specific project and add the date filter accordingly to check the spent hour in that date range.

So we can see Total estimated hour is 19 hours & 11hours 21 minutes is the total spent hours from 10^th February to 14^th February.

Out of 11 hour 21 minutes, 5 hours 50 minutes are the billable hours and 5 hours 31 minutes are non-billable.

Apart from list view, we can also find time log details in Calendar and Chart view as well.

From Calendar View, we can get the following details-

- - Total spent hours in a task for that day
  - Status of the task
  - Time logs in tasks

From Chart View, we can get the following details-

- - Total spent hours in a task for the specific day & who has worked in it
  - Total number of tasks, task status, assignee in one pie-chart
  - Total spent hours in tasks

Estimated vs Spent hour of a resource for a project–

As a project manager, you can also track resources’ productivity by trackingestimated vs spent hours in a project.You can select the resource name and project from drop-down to find the estimated vs spent hour of resource.

Here we can see that Daniel Jones has spent 9 hours 15 mins on the LSSM project out of the total spent hour of 17 hours.

4. Hour Spent Report:

Burndown chart shows Remaining actual vs estimated hour of the project within specified time range
Total hour spent per each task type within specified time range
Total hour spent by each resource inform of line chart & figures within chosen time range.