Enabling smarter resourcing with a convenient and easy-to-use Power Apps Time Tracker solution
Understanding how an organisation apportions its time is incredibly valuable. It can help with resourcing strategies, understanding where users are dedicating the most time (with a view to simplifying those tasks) or cross-billing where staff work across various divisions.
Time tracking is common in many industries but often requires expensive systems. It also tends to be loaded onto users’ PCs, meaning the user has to wait until they return to that device to log time. This can result in inaccurate records.
Our customer had teams whose work spanned a number of departments in their business. Management wanted to understand the effort that they were putting into each department as a way of understanding the division of labour and return in investment from their work.
The company only required a simple offering to track time but wanted a solution that could be used on the go and had options for reporting on. As all staff already used Microsoft Teams for business tasks and communication on the go, we established that a Power Apps Time Tracker built into Microsoft Teams would be the perfect solution.
Tracking From Teams
Linked into the department’s Teams team group, the time tracker offers a simple interface with a free text field to explain the task, a drop-down menu to select the department, the date and the amount of time spent on the task.
As it resides within Teams, staff can run the Power Apps Time Tracker from their PCs and from their mobile devices simultaneously and with no disruption. So as soon as a task is complete they can log the time used wherever they happen to be working.
Data from the time tracker can then be used in a number of ways. The organisation can export a straight log of time data in a .CSV file. For a more comprehensive overview, however, a Power BI report exists that allows managers to assess time usage by individual, by department and by type of task. This report can also have other data overlaid onto it (such as department costs and profitability) so that trends are more easily discoverable.
Smarter Resourcing With The Power Apps Time Tracker
Using the Power Apps Time Tracker within Microsoft Teams has given the organisation a better understanding of where effort is currently being directed. It’s helped managers to balance resource usage better, allowing time to be reallocated from one department to others where it's felt it is needed.
The Power Apps Time Tracker has also helped to identify tasks that are currently taking the longest. While this in part has helped management understand workload, it has also allowed the organisation to investigate other solutions for simplifying tasks, starting a digital transformation journey through the smarter use of business intelligence.
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