One of the major problems we had was the lack of accuracy of our effort estimates. With this system you can really measure the efficiency of our people and we can also measure the accuracy we achieve in our effort estimates. By finely measuring the various activities for each project we can adjust or estimates model and finally making estimates that make sense.

Not to mention that the system is also easy to use, easy to administer, it is very flexible, it is not expensive and we have a very good support from Replicon. As the system is so flexible, depending on how you set it up you can achieve different level of functionality and of course also of usability. Before implementing anything I recommend to sit down and design how you want to make the system work. For instance, what data do you want to get from it, the way you want to organise your projects and have a trial go. Even so if you realise at a later stage you made mistakes it is very easy to correct them without affecting too much (if not at all) the system and the history of data. I think it is a fundamental point to decide on a standard way to define the way to use the system (definition of projects, tasks, users, etc) and stick with this standard if you want to get back a consistent set of information.

We have also written a small application that at the end of the month takes the data out from the database and generates automatically an Excel file that is emailed automatically to the users individually. This Excel file is the official form that needs to be compiled by each employee to be archived by the personnel department for the Italian national security. This form contains, for each day of the month, information like working day, holidays taken, off sick, overtime, etc. Before Web Timesheet the user had to compile this form at the end of the month in addition to log the project activities during the month. With this system we have simplified our internal procedures and made our users happy as they have one less form to fill in.