Why is Costlocker a project manager’s best friend?

Struggles of a project manager

What’s the major problem all project managers deal with? I’m a project manager myself and I’ve been doing this kind of job for 10 years. Currently I’m have a position at 2FRESH, a digital agency who developed Costlocker.

When I came into contact with Costlocker for the first time, it was just an idea on paper. Anyway, everything about Costlocker made sense to me. That’s why I kept giving Tomas and Kamil my insights and discussing their brainchild. And then all of a sudden, Costlocker was there in all its beauty. It didn’t take even a year to develop it.

Too many tools

Until then, we’d been using several tools that, together, had given us more or less what we’d wanted to know: Toggl for time tracking, Resource Guru for resource planning, Google spreadsheets for evaluating projects after they’d been finished.

But then we were introduced Costlocker and we started testing it. It didn’t take long and we came to the point when testing wasn’t necessary anymore — it just worked. I have to say that the initial idea — having a complex tool for project management, resource planning, task assignment and capacity monitoring at my disposal — was a bit too extreme. In fact I needed to have sorted out just two essential things — time tracking and real time project evaluation. And Costlocker could deal with both of those problems.

The nightmare called Time Tracking

Time tracking is something all project managers in the entire world struggle with. Conducting effective work on a project is possible on condition that you dispose of relevant data. If your co-workers regard time tracking as a dreadful bother, then you basically don’t get the data you need. In this regard, Costlocker was a very nice surprise to me. It works for both “paper-trackers”, who put their hours down on a piece of paper and submit it in the evening, and for “stopwatch-trackers”, who use the built-in stopwatch and track every minute of their work.

Another problem Costlocker resolved is the way of defining, what task people should track their time under and how much time there’s left for that. Costlocker deals with that in an elegant and concise way. I don’t have to keep reminding everyone about everything. It all happens naturally and smoothly. I assign tasks to my colleagues and they know what to do and how to register that. Plus, I prefer the principle of the “task ownership”, therefore I don’t like inspecting who’s currently working on which project, whether everyone knows what to do and so on. I supervise the project and I’m responsible for that. And if I don’t have to babysit my colleagues I can “dispatch” more projects.

“After” means “Too Late”

One of the key things a project manager needs is having a real-time overview of his projects. There’s plenty of methods and tools for evaluating finished projects. Finished projects. It’s usually too late to evaluate a project after it’s been finished. It’s not an evaluation but rather a damage calculation. With Costlocker, I can figure all this out using a well-arranged report, in real time. I can take action before it’s too late and give the project the right course. The “action” means, for example, making our work more efficient, asking a client for the change of a dead line or for a revision of the budget. This feature can save a significant amount of your money.

Every project has its start and its end. And it’s necessary to evaluate it when it’s done. Everyone fears that and, at the same time, everyone’s looking forward to that. It’s great when you find out you’ve been successful, it’s painful when you find out you’ve failed. Having Costlocker at my disposal, I know exactly how every phase of the project is actually going, although I usually don’t evaluate the project for myself, but for the client or our management. The evaluation in Costlocker works just perfectly — both online and exported to .xls. Then you can do with that whatever you want. I often forward it to our clients who we charge by the hour.

Know your projects

The essential thing for all this is time tracking and Costlocker helps with that a lot. I have one rule. Every Monday at 10am, I check everybody’s hours tracked the week before, because you’re still able to trace it back and correct it if needed. This way, I regularly detect and prevent a loss of up to hundreds of dollars. It’s annoying, I know, but if I didn't have this tool, I wouldn’t even know about the loss.

I don’t think Costlocker is a redemptive solution on its own. A tool that assures you peace, comfort and faultlessness at work. It’s not solving problems like project planning, milestones, Gantt charts, methods or whatever. But it sorts out an issue substantial for every project manager — the perfect overview. A project manager needs to know, not hope or guess. He should lead the project not let the paperwork lead him.

Thanks to this tool, I can go back home with peace of mind, I can write this article without constant thinking of my projects and what will happen tomorrow. Because I finally know that.

– written by Jiri Padevet, a project manager at 2FRESH.cz