Features for Supervisors

GTimeReport has three base features for supervisors. First, it can help you by helping your employees with the reporting. Secondly, you can get a constantly updated project time report, split up in tasks. Thirdly, you can use GTimeReport for assessing that a planned schedule is distributed between coworkers in the desired way.

Getting reports from your employees

You can make it easier to get time reports in time by asking your employees to track their time in Google Calendar. Direct them to the instructions here: GTimeReport for Employees

If there are less computer savvy employees in your staff, you can ask them to share their reporting calendar read only to you or some other staff member, and you or someone else can take out the reports for them.

Keeping track of current project and task time

The first thing you need to do is to ask every project member to set up a project calendar for the project you want to track. (For each active project in reality)
Tell the project members to name the project calendar to the project name. (You can also change it in your view but it's less work for you this way.)

Task tracking is done by a very simple formatting of the text entered in the events in Google calendar.
In order to track tasks, make sure you give all your project tasks names or id's. If you are using Scrum you have the titles from the backlog, if you are using XP, you have your user story names, etc.
When the project members write into their Google Calendars, reporting work, there's two formatting options:
Write either just the task name, like "Design meeting", or if you want to have more info
write the task name, a colon symbol, and then the info, like so "Design meeting: Discussed main views and color schemes". Both ways can be used interchanging.

When you want to get a project report using this structured input, log in to www.gtimereport.com as usual, and this time, make sure to select the "merge similar items" setting. Select all the calendars that correspond to the project (for every employee). Now for the period and the project, you will receive a report with two parts. The upper day to day part of the report shows all "Design meeting" (and other tasks) hours added together per day for the entire project group. The lower part gives you the total of time spent on each task for the period.

You can of course select subgroups of the project, or individual calendars if you wish to drill down on the data.

Since all data can be exported to a spreadsheet, all of your favorite graphing tools are available for further analysis.

Planning and schedule help

If you would like help with creating schedules you can use GTimeReport to tell you if a schedule is fair or not, and how much hours you have scheduled in total and per person.

Just create a separate scheduling calendar.
Next write the names of the persons in the planned events you enter, "Adam", "Lisa" etc. If you need more info, write like so: "Adam: Pick apples". There is no problem putting multiple items in the same timeslot. Using a day view in Google Calendar makes it simpler. If it's very crowded, use multiple calendars.

When you are done with your schedule, log in to www.gtimereport.com and select the schedule calendar (or the schedule calendars if you needed to split it up). Next check the "merge similar items" setting. Click "Create report".
You will get a day to day overview first, but the second part is the most interesting. Here you can see how much hours each person is assigned for that period. You can also see a total of hours for all the persons.
For cost analysis you can export the report to a spreadsheet and calculate either with individual salaries or using the total hours.

What next?

If you don't have a Google account, go ahead and create one now. It's free.
You could also consider creating an apps account if you have a domain. Google Apps Business
There's also a free Google apps version for up to 50 users. Google Apps Standard
Open your calendar (in a new window): Google Calendar

 

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