Know-How Exchange : Other

Workload peaks and valleys are a familiar phenomenon for most consultants and marketers. And tracking hours doesn't really solve anything unless you get good at estimating the time you'll need in advance.

The best approach is to rely on your own experience (and that of other team members). You know when you're overloaded, and you probably have a pretty good sense of how long each new project is likely to take.

Trying to force-fit the estimates and projections into a rigid model are likely to just frustrate you ... and not improve things very much. Trust your gut ... and let your internal clients know you won't sacrifice quality for speed. (Or get a few outside contractors who will take your overflow when it's really important.)

Thanks mgoodman. The challenge here is that the organizations we support are large and complex with multiple stakeholders and a company culture that demands operational rigor. I need some reliable mechanism to consistenly track demand vs capacity. "We're too busy right now, but can get to your request at some undetermined point in the future." won't cut it. :-)

I agree that it would be a good idea to do some tracking for a few weeks at the same time that you might have to make some wild guesses as to how to work more efficiently. I, too, am an in-house team with six staff under me and we don't charge for services. We've tried a couple different project management tools and as with all tools, crap in gets you crap out. The staff gave me every excuse in the book for why it was too hard and too time-consuming to track every little minute they spent on a project. So I would make them do it in two week cycles, no excuses and then would let them stop for a while and I'd analyze the data I did have. In the end, it wasn't until we pretended that we were able to charge for our services and we kept records as such that we began to have an idea just how much time we spent on facets of projects and projects as a whole.

That exercise was about two years ago and we're back in the same boat with new management who wants to know why we can't do more and that the mandate is on-time over quality every single time.

We could go into the names and review of PM tools, but I've found it's really the business process behind the tool that matters most. What is hardest for me is managing the web programmer/designer and the print piece designer and the copywriter because they all work at such different speeds and with varying levels of deliverables that are able to be tracked for efficiency.
~stacy