Project Manager Time

[Oshadhi Vindhyani]

Hi. 

1.
As a project manager how do you tack your working time? 
In Jira we can get reposts on each team members time spend on project. But as a project manager. Most of your time will spend on meetings reports not particularly a project if you have a project portfolio  to manage. How do you take time measurements?  

2. 
What are the document you maintain for keep up with all the work when you work on few project at same time. How do you do your dependencies between various project tasks ?  

Please feel free share your experience, your best practice and your opinions . Thank you in advance 

[James Liu · Accepted solution]

Hi Oshadhi,

1. There is more than one way to skin the cat an answering your first question. As it all really depends on your objectives for why and what you are trying to do. In basic terms, it vastly changes depending on the driver(s) for doing it. e.g. if you need it for client billing, for the business, or for your own reference. An example for the first one might be logging all your time within the project/epic you've setup for that said client. Else, if you are charging per hour spent, when doing all your billing it will become very complex should it spread out across several projects. Then, on top of this you can use a dedicated 'Internal Activities' project that has predefined tasks, which will allow you to log the remainder of working day that doesn't involved client work (should you need to account for the rest of the time). However, this is just one strategy out of loads of ways of doing it, that largely depends on what outcomes you are expecting.
   
   Whatever approach you decide to use, logging time is simply a case of manually taking noting of the time you start on a task and then when you finish, or using some sort of timer app/tool to make it easier recording your timings. Your own work style will fundamentally dictate this, but in the past, when I've managed many client projects simultaneously, I'd personally collate most work for each client e.g. Would have certain days I would work on certain client projects. Then have tasks where you can do the same task across multiple projects together, reserved for a particular day such as client billing. Because, for that on average (doing it several times) you'll tend to spend the same amount of time doing each client/project, then simply recording the time spent in total and sharing the time used equally across all of them. This can make life a lot easier and still keep things fair. Although, should you have one project that is clearly consuming more time than the others because it's more complex. Then you can simply record the time spent for that one, away from the others. A reoccurring theme here, but again this is just one of many approaches I've used in the past.
   
   
2. This question is way more simple to answer, project planning! You can do this in Jira's Advanced Planning, that includes capacity planning to account all those project hours. This is assuming you have Jira Premium or better. Else there's the old faithful Microsoft Project, although very good in it's time you should really be using a tool more like Jira's solution, should the cost of the premium plan or better be the issue for getting it. However, for me if you're using Jira it's a no brainer to be using their solution, as you'll save a load of time (money) not having to constantly maintain plans as much (if at all), due to a lot of it being automatable and automatically updates as issues are being updated/resolved, and thus ensuring a more constant transparency of progress, that in turn means all stakeholders are better kept informed, as the live feeds of the plans can also be shared in numerous ways.

[Oshadhi Vindhyani]

@James Liu Thank you so much for providing the answer to my question! Your help is greatly appreciated. I'm grateful for your help and expertise. This answer is helping me with so many level. Thanks again!