Case Study: Project Management - Time Reporting for Various Teams
The client
The national water institute based out of European Region leverages knowledge and convening power to strengthen water governance for a prosperous, and sustainable future. A team of 200 scientists integrated together to find the solution to the global water crisis. They focus on the range and development within and around water that supports decision-making around the world. Their flagship program aims to connect water stakeholders internationally.
Location: Europe
Background
Our client is a not-for-profit institute dedicated to sustaining water governance. With a large employee strength spread across continents, it becomes a necessity to track, manage and streamline each employee activity in order to sync with the whole organization’s purpose.
Keeping a track of every employee’s time frame, role and activities can turn out to be a haphazard task if not streamlined in an organized manner. This is exactly what happened with this organization before we stepped in.
The Challenge
For a large workforce spread across more than 20 countries, remotely coordinating and synchronizing each employee’s daily time report and set of activities can be challenging for the human resource department as well as for the team leads.
The organization comprises various departments like Finance, Project Management Teams, R&D Teams and Human Resource. Each department is highly autonomous and therefore, maintains its own set of records and employee information by using different applications.
Before we came into the scene, the organization was using simple Excel sheets to track and monitor the time recording of each of its employees. Due to the presence of a number of departments maintaining their own set of employee records, it became a challenge for the Human Resource Department to collect and record the data in a single database using a tool like Excel. They needed a solution that was robust, automated and easily integrated.
Some of the major repercussions/ challenges that propped up due to this decentralization of data are:
- Major duplication of data like user profile, managers, projects, work orders, team details, etc. across departments.
- The huge manual workload for each department to maintain each set of employee data on different applications and then conglomerating all information manually into a single Excel sheet.
- A gap in real-time communication and transparency due to redundancy in data integration and reporting.
- Lack of a single database of employee information due to the absence of a robust software template with end-to-end solutions.
The Solution
Our role here was to mitigate the major challenge of repetitive data, manual workload and disintegration with the help of software and our consultant expertise.
Following are the major steps that were undertaken to meet these challenges:
- Master data bank: A master data bank or a single unified data bank for the whole organization was created. This database includes all the information related to each employee with different levels of security access for each stakeholder.
- Power App: A Power App was developed to manage and organize this master data bank. Users/ employees can easily log in to the Power App and add/update their details and the app automatically syncs the information into the database in real-time.
- Leveraging tools: In-house templates of collaborative tools like Timesheet and Smartsheet were customized and designed to adapt to the needs of the organization in order to manage the employee time tracking as well as other employee information.
- A Robust Customizable Time Reporting Tool: We developed and designed a user-friendly employee time reporting tool exclusively for the organization. Here are some of the steps that were taken:
- All the project and work order-related details were synced into the SQL server by integrating it with the existing source of data.
- The SQL server was then integrated with our designed Timesheet software template in order to sync the information into Timesheet.
- MS Power Automate was used for the integration of the software.
- To meet the data visualization and reporting requirements, Timesheet data was integrated with the Power BI tool to depict a bird’s eye view of the real-time report.
The organization finally had a single unified employee database and employee time tracking reports that could be accessed by the stakeholders remotely from anywhere in the world.
Ignatiuz
Ignatiuz Software is a Microsoft Silver Partner technology consultancy and software development company, having expertise in delivering far-reaching technology and software solutions. Ignatiuz assists its clients by making optimum use of available technological resources to support and ultimately deliver on their business goals through managed IT services, IT governance, portfolio management, and overall process improvement.