Using distribution lists

This is my third post in the series on Time Manager 2010 Quarter 3.  Today I’m going to keep it simple and show you how to set up distribution lists.  Even though this is a very easy process, it has powerful implications because it means you can now send reports to multiple email addresses simply, and can schedule reports on a regular basis and have them automatically distributed.

To view the video just click here.

To view the other two videos so far in this series you can click on the links below.

Simple report scheduling

Scheduling reports

Next time I am going to roll my sleeves up and show you some of the more powerful features available through the Alerts and Scheduling engine.

Scheduling reports in Time Manager Part 1

In my last post I told you how, in the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager reports could not be sent to a separate Scheduling and Alerts engine.  Today I am going to extend that concept and tell you a little about how reports can be scheduled.  You can view a five minute video of the process by clicking here.

Offloading reports to another process is only of limited use.  However, setting up a report once and then running it at regular intervals becomes much more interesting.  It allows you to pass a great deal of administrative work out to the alerts engine.

An example might be a productivity report you run once a month on the third of each month for the previous month.  Instead of having to remember to open Time Manager, select the report, select what data to appear on the report and run it, you can now set this up as a scheduled report and have it delivered to your inbox automatically.

The video will show you more about how scheduling of reports works.

Next time I will tell you about distribution lists and some of the other alert functions which do not rely on reporting.

Running reports offline

This is the first blog post about the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager.  This is going to be fairly brief, as I just want to tell you about how, with the introduction of the new Scheduler engine, you can now send reports for offline processing.  This means you free up the system for other work immediately instead of having to wait.  The report will be sent back to you as an email attachment.

All well and good, but you can also send the report and say “Run this next Monday at 5 a.m., and then every Monday from then on”.  That means, for example, you can have a Missing Timesheet report sitting on your desk when you get in Monday morning.  So instead of spending the first ten minutes of the day running reports (or forgetting until Tuesday), the work has been done for you.

The first video showing how to do this can be seen by clicking here.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about Alerts and scheduling other kinds of operations offline.

Time Manager 2010 Quarter 3 is (almost) here

I am pleased to announce that this quarter’s release of Time Manager is almost here.  Version 2010.3.1113 will be uploaded to the hosted server this coming Sunday, 14th November 2010, and will be available to download from our ftp site by Monday morning the 15th.

This is a major release of Time Manager, containing a whole host of new and improved features, as well as a couple of fixes.  You can view a full list of the changes by clicking here.

Below is a brief summary of what we consider the most exciting new features.

Report Scheduling and Alerts

This completely new addition allows you to run and schedule reports offline, create distribution lists and schedule any report to run at regular intervals.
Alerts can be selected to email individual staff if they have not completed their timesheet for the previous week.
Other functionality will be built into the next quarter’s release, but we want it to be functionality useful to you, so we are waiting for your suggestions on what you would like to see added to the Alerts list.  Maybe offline recosting of time, maybe offline flexitime calculation.  It’s down to you, so start thinking and let us know.

Billing and Billing auditing

Calculation of time billing sneaked in during the previous release, but we have now extended it to create automatic audit entries if you change a timesheet that has already been billed for.  All of this can be controlled by you, turning these features on and off to meet your particular requirements.

Additional control over Reports

We have added some additional flags to control what appears or does not appear on reports.  You can now choose to include archived Projects and Staff, as well as only report on Approved time entries.

Leave requests in hours

Leave can now be requested in hours as well as days, and this can be set on individual leave entries as well.

Project Targeting

A lot of new work has been done on Project targeting, making it both faster and more robust

I am enthusiastic about the list of new features and improvements in this release, but I don’t want to go on too long here.   Keep checking back on the blog pages as over the next few weeks more details of this new release will be posted here first.

Release videos

As in previous releases, a series of videos are currently in production to walk you through the great new features available.  The first of these, on Scheduling and Alerts will be posted this week, and I will post a Blog entry here when it is available.  So check back regularly to see when this is released, and find out what this new version of Time Manager can offer you.

Time Manager Alerts

I am just putting the finishing touches to the initial release of the Time Manager Alerts functionality.  This is a major enhancement both for Time Manager and to a smaller extent Profess.

The feature will be available in the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager which is still pencilled in for the end of September.  Hosted users will find this installed and available automatically.  Installed users of Time Manager will need to install and configure the Alerts service.  Full documentation will be available on release.

At present the following functionality is available:

• Run any report on a schedule and send back to yourself or a distribution list.  You can enter flexible selection criteria that are evaluated at the time the report is run.  This means you could run a report for This Month, or Last Month, This Week, or Last Week and it would use the dates that apply when it is run.
• Calculate and distribute Missing Timesheets.
• Calculate and distribute Missing Timesheets by Team Manager.  This is nice and simple, just set it up once and leave it run.  The calculation takes care of who to send the report to for all members of a managers Team.
• Look for and inform individual staff if they have not Submitted or Completed a Timesheet on time.

Other alerts can be added in, but these are the ones users have requested so far.

If you have any ideas for alerts that would be useful both to you and others, please get in touch with me so we can decide how achievable they are, as we are actively looking to add new alert functionality.

Tips on Speeding

I am not normally the one to offer technical tips for Time Manager – I leave that to the Helpdesk and the techies in the back office here at Pillar.

But there’s one area I feel really needs reiterating and that is the impact of flexi-time recording on Event entry, particularly on slower connections or networks.

Here are my top 2 things to do right now if you have speed issues and yet still wish to use Time Manager’s zero-entry innate flexi-recording facility.

1. Turn ON ad-hoc manual Recalc.
   This will stop recalculation of flexi every time you enter a new Event, and give you control of when YOU want to refresh the flexi balance. Stopping the flexi calculation will increase the speed it takes to write an Event to file/screen as there simply is less for the system to do.
2. Reduce the breadth of the Flexi re-calc
   Get Time Manager to only look forward enough to reflect what you actually find useful.

I explain both of these in a bit more detail below. But if you have any questions, e-mail us at support@profess.co.uk

And, don’t forget to cast your vote in the Speed vs Features debate.

Ad-hoc Manual Re-calculation of Flexi-time balance (Journal view)

This is controlled by a global setting (meaning the same will apply for all users of the Journal view, i.e. it is NOT a My Settings personal option), and can be located via menu path Administration > Validation {tab}: Update Flexi-time on entry of each Event.

Un-check this option to turn ON manual ad-hoc recalculation of the flexi-time balance; a new Update button will appear to the right of the Flexi summary line at the top of the Journal view (although you will have to Refresh for it appear straight away).

Now Events will be created and only the Working Hours updated (along with the standard validation). This makes entry much quicker, especially when entering time by dragging favourites into the Journal grid. Absolutely no flexi calculation will take place.

But if you want the Flexitime to be refreshed to show the latest picture, just hit the Update button to force a complete Flexi refresh along the summary line for the current week in edit.

Reduce the Breadth of the Flexi Re-calculation (Journal view)

Time Manager allows you to set how far you want the calculation to read into the future. Realistically, planned leave aside, most people will have noted that the current day’s Flexi balance will be displayed in lieu of how much time is booked today. The Flexi b/f from yesterday or last week is the true reflection of time in credit/debit coming into today, but until today is finished I won’t know what my balance is. So, by extension, why complicate unnecessarily by having Time Manager read a number of days into the future. So I recommend reducing the figure held in Administration > Validation {tab}: Extend Flexi-time Calculation X days beyond the end of the current week.

Personally, I’d set this to 3 merely to catch the start of next week, but only if I am using TM for forward planning work (where I place Events into the future and, thus see what my Flexi balance will be based on my prediction of how long I am working for). If I wasn’t doing that I’d set it to 0. However, remember this is a global value, so the rule applies to ALL users on the database.

And, of course, you might not get the setting right for your office straight away. But certainly try and reduce the number to see if you get improved performance without any loss of functionality.

Keeping your server up to date

I had a recent support call which came up when  a User upgraded to the latest version of Profess Time Manager.  A weird error was being thrown, and I could not reproduce it here or on any of our test servers, even when running with the user’s data.  I finally tracked it down by following the error message and finding that we were relying on a function only present in ASP.Net Ajax SP2.

Once I found that, the solution was simple.  Download from the following url and apply the latest version for your specific operating system:

 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5b2c0358-915b-4eb5-9b1d-10e506da9d0f&displaylang=en

While the answer was quick, it did take me 30 minutes trawling through a trace log to find the issue, and it made me realise that there are a lot of servers out there that do not get patched automatically, and I wondered why?  If automatic updates had been turned on, this would have been updated immediately.

All of our servers, both live and test, and our hosted server, have automatic updates turned on.  Perhaps people really don’t trust Microsoft to ship reliable patches, but surely the alternative is worse?  Software that doesn’t work and security that is compromised.  I often hear the comment that IT Departments like to have control over what patches they apply, but unless you have a large and very knowledgeable IT Department, I would always prefer to trust the guys in Microsoft to get my server running sweetly – life is too short to have to understand ALL of this techy stuff.

So, just a little plea: Update early and update often.

Assigning Security functions to a User in Time Manager

Part of the new security module in Profess Time Manager allows you greater flexibility in what the users see and what they have access to.

You are now able to set up Security groups that can only have access to the projects menu under setup and no other option.

Two security groups are defined automatically:

Administrator – this has access to all menu options (with a quirk)

Default – this has access only to core functionality required to enter time, expenses etc.

You can add additional user groups, and define alternative menu options by using the Setup, Staff, Security Groups menu.  Then check on or off the options you want that security group to have.  Finally, assign the new security group to those staff you would like to make use of it.

On occasions new menu options are added to Time Manager to provide additional functionality.  By default these new menu options are not available to existing security groups.  When we do add menu options, you will always be informed of this.  To make these options available you just follow a simple process:

Open each security group inn turn.  As the page is displayed, all new options will be automatically ticked on so just scroll down, click on Save and the new features are made available to the group.

Of course, you might also want to consider whether you wish to make any new feature available.  If you do not open and save a Security group the new feature are not available.

Using Security groups means you can configure the entire access structure of Time Manager, simplify menu options just to those required by groups of staff, disable entire menu trees such as Administration or Setup, and make the user experience more tailorered to individual groups of users.

Clearing Event page filtering

New clear buttons have been placed to the right of each drop down on the Event page.

When you click on one of these, the item in the drop-down is cleared down.

If you clear the Project, then all other values are also cleared to ensure data integrity.

This is useful in two scenarios’:-

1. You start search-typing for a Project and the drop-down finds a match, but then you release you’ve typed the wrong one and want to change it – it is now quicker to use the Clear button.
2. You have copied an Event (using the Right-Drag on a Week Journal view (where Right-Drag Copy is turned ON)), this will have copied the Project and Activity combination of your original, but you want to change the Activity – simply use the new Clear button to clear the Activity and the use the drop-down to select the alternative you want to book to.

Previously you would have had to highlighted the line in the search field and press delete.

Andy’s 15 minutes

You’ve probably heard Northcote Parkinson’s maxim ‘work expands to fill the time available.’

That’s probably true, but can you imagine trying to get it all on your timesheet?

When it comes to timesheeting, the balance between accuracy and expediency is a delicate one.

You want the information you squeeze out of your data to be accurate and a true reflection of how much time a job has taken and thus, perhaps, how much it has cost (and even how much we will be charging, where relevant).

But you don’t want to spend your life filling in timesheets. Not when we’ve got real, productive work to do. And, as I’ve said before, filling in timesheets isn’t fun – of that we can be sure. Until they invent a way of getting a chocolate muffin to pop out of your CD-Rom tray each time you submit your timesheet it never will be.

So how can we balance the two opposing factions of accuracy vs expediency?

One way is the 15-minute rule.

This is what we do at our office. Most jobs take a minimum of 15 minutes, even if they really only take 5. What? I hear you say.

It’s simple. You may spend 5 minutes and 36 seconds on a telephone call to a customer or colleague, for example.

• You then spend a further 3 minutes noting the outcome of that call (perhaps you create a To Do in Time Manager, a Task in Outlook, or jot something down in a notepad or Post-It).
• Maybe you need to note the conversation against the Project in Time Manager using the Comment facility, or append something in your own Document Management system because of the conversation.
• You then spend another 15 seconds visually locating the Project & Activity combination from your Favourites and dragging it into the correct time slot on your timesheet.
• You then spend another 2-3 minutes getting back to what you were doing before the telephone call.
• But not before you spend a minute talking to the person who sits opposite you.
• Or, since you’ve been disturbed anyway, perhaps you check your e-mails.
• You get the idea…

We guess that, on average, we probably spend at least a minimum of 15 minutes per distinct Activity. That does not mean our timesheet is full of 15 minute chunks, but that we’ve taken the decision not to reduce the time any less than that. We don’t charge that accurately so why record time to any greater precision?

Now the example above doesn’t add up to 15 minutes, I hear the pedants among you say. And you’re right, it doesn’t. But how often do you record that water-cooler chat on your timesheet? Or that trip to the WC? Or that impromptu turn about some anecdote about your children? Or that breezy moment spent wistfully gazing out the window, which however brief, recharges your batteries for the remainder of the day? Or that charitable round of teas and coffees you made? Or that brief but necessary corridor discussion with your line manager about that impeded Project? Or that TIME spent showing a colleague how to do something clever in Excel? Or those moments spent un-jamming the stapler?

All these things make up the rest of the 15 minutes booked throughout the day. Even if the actual Productive task really was 5 minutes.

Conversely, if I spent 1hr39mins on a Crystal Report, I’ll book it as 1hr45mins – multiples of 15 minutes. This saves me time trying to think where to book the balance, when in fact, I probably didn’t start on the button of a 15minute block, often to the credit of the customer and – either way – I will probably have to do some wrap-up or admin tasks around it and other bits and pieces. So the idea works here too.

What is apparent though is that this is EASY.

And if it is EASY it is more likely to work and become second-nature.

Of course, the 15minute example might not apply for all disciplines (for example, a lot of legal users use 6-minute time units and Time Manager allows you to set for yourself both the default time unit block size and the number of blocks to assign against a drag-Favourite action, e.g. 2×15 minute blocks = half an hour etc.), but the point is don’t make time recording any more difficult than the precision by which business decisions will be made based on the output of that data.

So, we find 15 minutes works just fine. Andy Warhol thought so too – maybe in a different way, but he simplified his concept to make it workable.

Next time I’ll talk about refining how we record our time; that is, looking at our protocol for time recording – an often overlooked element of rolling-out a managed approach to time recording.