The first step is to work with you to help you understand the data that you already have about your people, tasks and time. The only thing that you really need to get started with hOurAnalysis is employee time sheets. If you're not recording timesheets, you can download the hOurAnalysis template and easily start to capture this. If you already you have some form of timesheet data from an Excel spreadsheet or another piece of software, we can bulk upload that data (current and historical) to hOurAnalysis so that you can begin YOUR analysis. Uploading your data is free – no cost incurred. Once you have that data uploaded, you will need to buy a single user at a minimum to access the analysis (see our Pricing section). As a single user you will have the ability to begin to slice and dice the hours that have been consumed by your employees by person, by project, and by activity. Welcome to the land of insight, knowledge and power! Once you've uploaded your data into our system you can begin to do day by day, week by week, month by month, quarter by quarter and possibly year by year analysis (if you have sufficient historical data). You can drill down into that data to find out what does this monthly figure consist of? What projects were worked on in that month? What resources contributed to those hours? And, what tasks were performed on those projects? You will be able to do a side-by-side comparison of November last year with November of this year, last quarter with this quarter, quarter four last year against quarter four for this year. Any number of slicing and dicing activities can be performed so that you can begin to understand what are the moving parts that lead to revenue and cost. The insight that you will gain from this will determine your next steps e.g. maybe you're not recording sufficient level of activities; maybe you're inconsistent about how you record the same activity on different projects? This insight will allow you to begin to standardize how you measure activities and you can then get on to the next level of analysis, when you’re ready.

So, let's imagine that you now have a full set of reports and alerts and thresholds that indicate which jobs or which projects are at what level of progress, and which are within budget, on time or exceeding budget. You can then begin to turn from reactive to proactive management of your business. As you track these elements, you will likely begin to consider how your service delivery could be improved. For example, you may consider that some of the tasks (activities) could be performed by a more junior resource thereby developing the resource, reducing the cost of providing the service, and freeing up your senior resource for higher value activities. This is management nirvana! You might also consider streamlining your internal processes, integrating your quoting process with hOurAnalysis – this is after all where all projects start! We would advise at this stage that you begin to use our quoting facility so that you can begin to create new quotes based on the activities that are performed within your organization. You can then use the budgets to create target timesheets for those resources responsible for delivering those projects. We offer 3 levels of creating quotes. The first level is where you already know, based on experience and history, that this quote should be somewhere in the ballpark of 50 hours for Stage 1, 100 hours for Stage 2, 20 hours for Stage 3 and 10 hours for Stage 4 for example. Therefore, you should be able to enter those quantities for those Stages, apply a rate and come up with a very quick quote for that particular piece of work. The next category of quote is where you're able to quote at a very high level for most of the project, but not all elements of it. For the lesser-known elements of the project you might want to perform a more line-item description of the exact activities you expect to perform. hOurAnalysis will enable you to do this. The final level of quoting is where this is a new area of work that you've been anxious to compete in but may lack the experience to provide high level quotes. hOurAnalysis will allow you to add every single line item that you can possibly imagine so that you can play with the quote in a way that allows you to ensure that you captured every possible scenario that you're aware of at the time of the quote. You might even match the RFQ line for line! Either way, once your quote is ready for submission, hOurAnalysis will have the source documents sent to you to generate the quote, your notes and observations of potential gotchas and the high level or line-item detail of the quote, so that when you win it, you’ll know what you quoted for and what you were thinking when you quoted it. So, let's assume now you're after winning one of the high-level quotes and you want to deploy your resource types for the next week or the next two weeks. You can now engage the planning functionality of the system. You can take the quotes and turn it into a live project plan and detail next week and perhaps the week after by allocating the required resource type (e.g. engineer) to that plan. If it's a high-level quote you didn't need to put in the discrete activities for each Stage and allocate a resource type to it, so this will allow you to plan the resource types by whatever milestone is appropriate for your business. .

At this stage you may want to make an additional investment in hOurAnalysis. Unless you chose to use direct input of timesheets into the system, up until now you've received all of the benefits of this system to analyze and understand your business, to generate ‘slice and dice’ reports by project by person by activity, and to do budget to actual comparisons, as a single user. Let's imagine you're still a single user of the system and you're about to go into the planning phase (detailing the activities to be completed on a new project). You've applied the resource type (e.g. engineer) to the task and you now have the option to allocate a specific resource of that resource type (e.g. John Black) to the project and thereby give a weekly target to that resource that will pre populate their timesheet based on the plan that you are creating. You can only deploy resources to a project plan if that resource is a user of the system (contact us to talk about purchasing more users). This will allow you to really optimize your resource usage. For example, a senior engineer could be selected to mentor a junior engineer, undertaking to perform five hours of mentoring every week for the next six weeks. Both of these resources will have a template timesheet for this period, and one of the elements of the timesheet will be ‘mentoring’. When the senior engineer chooses mentoring he will also be asked to choose the resource that he is mentoring. Once he makes that entry the corresponding entry is made in the junior engineer's timesheet. In the junior engineer’s timesheet, there is an entry indicating that the senior engineer has given them mentoring. But that mentoring will only be deemed to have taken place if the junior engineer places a tick in the box and agrees with the number of hours has been received. If the tick in the box is not placed in the timesheet by the junior engineer that results in an exception. Now you as the manager can find out why did the senior engineer think he mentored and why did the junior engineer think he did not. You begin the process of enabling mentoring and cooperation between senior and junior resources. The senior engineer benefits because he is beginning to delegate some of his more tedious tasks to somebody who is interested in learning the responsibilities of a senior engineer. Now what we have is a coordinated and agreed process of development where the senior engineer is learning mentoring skills the junior engineer is learning senior engineering skills and while there may be a short term increase in the number of hours required to perform the senior engineer task by the junior engineer it will be offset by the lower cost of the junior engineer. What we're talking about here is Nirvana, a junior resource operating at the most senior level that they are capable of and the most senior resource is empowering the lower cost resource to develop their skills, while simultaneously freeing up their own time to pursue more senior roles within your organization. What you have is a spiraling upwards of empowerment, skills development, proactive behavior, real time reporting and an opportunity to tell most of your team well done, very frequently. This is completely within reach. It begins with you understanding the analytics and mechanics of the hours that you are paying for through wages and salaries and how they are consumed by the team, how you are selling those hours and you're doing all of this in real time! .