Should you work more or should you work less?

According to effective task scheduling and time-keeping, the work hours of resources of a project should be planned and scheduled in advance. The team leader creates schedules for individual and group work, sets an estimated time needed to complete a task and also compares actual time spending with planned schedules. The team leader is particularly interested in work hours spent in any strictly work-related efforts by the team members. Besides, by comparing actual time with estimated time, the team leader can judge about an employee's task performance.

VIP Task Manager allows to find out how many hours during a workday a team member spends actually doing his/her tasks, and then to compare actual time to scheduled one. In VIP Task Manager any task has two fields 'Actual Time' and 'Estimated Time'. The first field is filled by a resource and the second one is filled by the team leader in advance when he creates individual schedules. To put actual work hours against scheduled work time, the team leader can create a new custom field 'Actual/Estimated' and use a formula for calculations. The custom field 'Actual/Estimated' will show a result in percentage terms, i.e. it shows whether a team member is ahead of his schedule, or he just procrastinates the tasks.

Action plan:

1. Launch task management software
2. First of all, the team leader should create the custom field 'Actual/Estimated' and insert formula: the difference between Actual Time and Estimated Time
3. When creating and assigning a new task to a team member, the team leader should use the field 'Estimated Time' to set up a planned time for a task completion
4. When a task is completed, the team member fills the field 'Actual Time'
5. The custom field 'Actual/Estimated' will automatically calculate the team member's performance in percentage terms