Article

An Efficient Time Enhancer
By Dr. Donald E. Wetmore President, Productivity Institute, November 2000

For the last twenty years, I have been a time management specialist having made over 2,000 presentations to audiences from around the world helping organizations to get more done in less time with fewer resources, all for increased effectiveness and profitability. While it is a fixed asset, it affords variable benefits, as we choose to use it or fail to use it.

There are two ways to use time more wisely. First, individually, we can manage ourselves more effectively in relation to time. (i.e. Developing new skills and planning more effectively so that we move faster and more efficiently.) Second, organizationally, by selecting tools that will help our organization accomplish and manage tasks and processes more effectively. (I.e.: Better tools and equipment, training, and processes that will likely make the conveyor belt move more rapidly.)

A fundamental function at the core of almost any organization, no matter what their mission or purpose for being, is the process of accomplishing projects and managing a workforce efficiently in relation to those projects. It is here that success or failure is determined and profits may be won or lost. For example, an employee who is making $50,000 per year and is wasting just one hour per day is costing the organization $6,250 per year in salary alone without adding in benefits, overhead, and lost profitability. On the flip side, if an organization can help that one person recapture just one hour per day of additional productive time, there is a payback to the organization of $6,250 in value. Multiply this by a large number of employees and the stakes are tremendous. 

Further, major increases in organizational productivity do not typically require quantum leaps of effort or expense. Like a horse race where the first horse receives a $50,000 purse and the second is awarded a $25,000 purse, the first horse did not have to run twice as far or twice as fast to get twice the result. It only had to be a nose ahead of the competition. And so it is with most organizations. Great increases in overall output may require only small changes of input.

Most organizations are sensitive and responsive to the requirement of effectively managing projects and their workforces. The problem is, however, that many organizations are not able to maximize their workforce and project completions because they do not have adequate systems in place to control and manage them or they use systems that are so cumbersome, complex, outdated, inefficient and clunky that they do not do the job. Accordingly, human capital is wasted, deadlines are missed and loose ends slip through the cracks as profitability suffers. 

Why? Because most organizations create systems as they go, out of need and necessity. The result is they often wind up with a patchwork quilt that, while functional, may be at a level of complexity that sacrifices effectiveness. It resembles in many ways the 100-year-old factory with a collection of disjointed and unmatched additions added on to the original building, a functioning but inefficient building. Every organization, then, manages its projects and their workforce. That is not the issue. The issue is how well they do it.

Therefore, I am always on the hunt for tools and resources to help organizations manage their projects and workforces more effectively and I recently discovered a most useful software tool from Tenrox, called "Tenrox PSA" that fits the bill.

Tenrox PSA provides any organization with a fully integrated software program that simply and effectively manages the details of project management and workforce management from soup to nuts providing a myriad of useful data and analysis. It easily automates a lot of the paper monitoring procedures that are time consuming, expensive, and error prone and, in the final analysis, fail to provide management with the type of data and reports necessary to manage effectively. Its three major benefits are its ease (and therefore acceptability) of use, its ability to generate an incredible array of reports in great detail, and its holistic application in helping to manage projects and workforce issues.

I am not a computer guy. I am a time management guy. And one important principle of good time management is simplicity. We have enough complexity in the substance of what we must accomplish so that if we incorporate tools that are in and of themselves complex, they are likely to not be used or not used to their full productive benefit. I spent less than thirty minutes working with my Tenrox technician to gain a comfortable working knowledge of Tenrox PSA. This is software that almost anyone can utilize with a quick understanding and a level of confidence. 

The two main features of Tenrox PSA provide an enormous payback. 

First, is the area of Project Management. Tenrox PSA is easily customized to take a project from beginning to end. Step by step, the user can complete all project planning in another software such as Microsoft Project, then import this information into Tenrox PSA to identify all procedures and resources required, and as users enter data (time, expense and all kinds of related information), create all vital reports to monitor the project from beginning to end. The real-time email notifications keep everyone informed of missing timesheet and budget overruns.

Second, is the area of workforce optimization. There often seems to be a correlation between the size of a project and the inefficiency of the workforce. The more significant the project, the greater the probability of inefficiently using a workforce. Tenrox PSA is a powerful yet simple tool to keep a comprehensive accounting of workforce time and expense to whatever detail is desired. 

The bottom line? As a manager of any type of organization, one can easily input any project, identify the resources and staffing needed to complete it, create schedules to follow, track time for the workforce as it should be and actually is added to the mix, track expenses, monitor costs by project, client, or group, monitor overtime, and generate customer invoicing, and a whole lot more. I can readily see where we have been, where we are now, and where we need to go to whatever level of detail and reporting I require. The result is more efficient use of workforce resources, improved performance and hence customer satisfaction, reduced expenses, improved cash flow, and greater profitability. Management is released from so much of the arduous task of creating and processing data to using that same time to analyze data.

Tenrox PSA is the link for capturing data many organizations have been missing to better manage projects and workforces. It interfaces easily with Microsoft Project, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Outlook, SAP, ADP Payroll, Lotus Notes, Symantec's Act and other commonly used accounting and payroll systems and becomes the unique glue to meld them all together for greater productivity.