Web-Based Timesheets for Project Management

What is project management? What it isn’t is a carefully crafted Gantt chart made to support a Project Charter and then forgotten about.

A cornerstone of effective project management is to understand how much effort has been expended and what tasks have been accomplished, and then to use that information to guide completion of the project and to publish status reports that can be trusted. Project management is a closed loop, one popular model is the PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) cycle.

Check refers not only to the expected output, but also to the process – whether resources are being consumed as expected, whether risks remain acceptable, if schedule and cost-to-complete forecasts are still reasonable and in budget, etc.

For small enterprises, collecting information on effort typically means timesheets. Project infrastructure can sometimes be leveraged for metrics, such as a software bug tracker or a sprint planning tool, but this generally requires a large number of datapoints before being accurate enough for project management purposes. For SMEs with relatively few team members on a project, the ubiquitous timesheet will be the simplest and least intrusive method of collecting project effort metrics. Since many organizations require timesheets anyway for financial accountability, the additional work to also collect information useful project management need not be significant if done in the right way.

I’m working on a series of blog posts on SME product development project management, and researched the state of open source timesheet applications for use in a strawman based on a Swift Construction Company product development project. You’ll find out later which application I selected, but until then here the potential candidates I found.

]project-open[

]project-open[ is a fully featured portfolio project management suite. However, unfortunately with great power also comes significant complexity and in brief use I was unable to create a simple project and submit a timesheet. Commercial support is available, and the project co-founder walked me through some impressive basic functionality in a personal webinar.

ProjeQtOr

ProjeQtOr is a fully featured project management suite with a twist – with ProjeQtOr you  also get “all the tools that will ease to ensure conformity to any Quality Management System, effortlessly and without any extra too”. This approach has a lot of merit. Issues are issues whether they relate to a product in production or the execution of a project task, and investigating a non-conformance is just as much a project as is development of a new product or upgrading IT infrastructure.

qdPM

I used qdPM for several months to record effort for a personal project. qdPM is a freemium-type product, and the community version is licensed using the Open Source license. It is a professional grade product.

To me, qdPM seemed to suit product support more than project management, and includes top-level menu items for Tickets, Discussions, and Software Versions. Entering time spent on a task is done by creating a comment, and traditional project management such as cost vs time are not readily available.

timeEdition

timeEdition appears best suited for a single individual to track their personal project time, rather than actual project management. Although it appears to be commercial proprietary software from the website, I found a source code on Sourceforge using an open source license (see timeEdition Sourceforge project).

TimeTracker

TimeTracker lives up to its claim of being a simple, easy to use, open source, web-based time tracking application. After experimenting with it for a while, my only complaints are that tasks are not inherently project-specific, which could make task management overwhelming if you have a large number of projects, each with a large number of tasks. However, projects specify which tasks they include, so the task list is still manageable from a user’s perspective. 

TimeTrex

TimeTrex has a flashy website, but at heart is a traditional time-card system for scheduling and tracking task-based employees, not managing projects. You can download TimeTrex Community v9.1.3 from the TimeTrex project on Sourceforge if you don’t want to provide your email address using the TimeTrex website.

Additional Applications

I found another of other applications as well, but for one reason or another I didn’t have the opportunity to investigate further, or on cursory glance they didn’t seem suitable (remember, my original goal was a simple easy to use timesheet, not necessarily project management).

Watch for the start of my posts on project management to learn which application I selected for a Swift Construction Company strawman.

Cheers!

2 Replies to “Web-Based Timesheets for Project Management”

  1. I took a quick look at Rukovoditel and it certainly looks intriguing but it wasn’t clear if timesheets were in the free core, it seemed the proprietary extended plugin pack was needed for most practical use cases.

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