Time Registration - More Than Just Overhead


By Hans Bool


One of the many differences between project management and operational management involves the use of time registration. Time registration is the basis for project management to function properly, whereas for operational management time registration is not often used.

Time registration is a very simple mechanism where a individual member registers the time spend on a certain activity. Doing so makes it possible to compare the planning of activities – before they are executed – with the realization of those activities during the course of the project. Introducing this registration activity adds overhead to your project, but you could easily justify this by the increased communication it provides. The importance of communication can never be stressed enough. You are able to communicate to your sponsor that certain activities were not planned or that other work took longer than expected -- because of a certain cause.

Time registration is also possible for operational management, but this is often experienced as a burden without the additional benefit. Unless you work in a call center and your time is registered automatically once you logon to the system. In what other situations would you want to register the time you dedicate to activities? “You just need to do your work… and we know what to do…” But also there, time registration is additional overhead that pays of later.

To see this, think of your working day as a small project. And during this project you dedicate your time to a variety of activities. If you do not (officially) register where you did spend your time at, you take the risk that those category of activities that you like best get most of your time and the one’s that are less favorite get probably less than needed.

What you need to do next is find a simple list of activities with which you fill your day and label them with how much you prefer to do each of them. The one’s you prefer less are probably the one’s that are most important, even if they are only ten percent of your daily project.

And the rest we all know; start with those difficult one’s first.

© 2006 Hans Bool

Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days.


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