Getting Started with Time Management
If you intend to use Time Management in your team, but you have never used it before, you should read this page to know how to get setup.
If you aren't familiar at all with Time Management, read the introduction first. It will get you acquainted with the basic terms used.
You need Administrator rights to do the setup. We will also assume that you have already created your team, and that the users whose time will be managed by TeemWork have been added.
As mentioned in the introduction, here is a quick rundown of what you need before attempting the configuration of TeemWork:
Make a list of all the Activities of your team
Activities are what the team members do, such as 'Work on Project X', 'Cleaning in the warehouse' or 'Talking with clients'. You can be as precise as you want; if you want to know exactly what the employees are doing, use descriptive names. If it is not important, you can use generic names like 'Office Work'.
It doesn't matter if this list is not complete; you can always add more Activities later
Regroup similar Activities and select one or more supervisors for each group
These groups are called 'Activity Types'. Some examples are: 'Marketing', 'Administration', and 'Human Resources'.
The supervisor(s) will be responsible for choosing the specific Activities that the users can do. He can also add new Activities to the Activity Types that he has access to. In fact, Administrators don't have to make a complete list of Activities; they could simply create the Activity Types, and delegate the Activity creation to the supervisors.
Select the participants of every Activity Type
The supervisor of an Activity Type only supervises its participants. The supervisor of the 'Human Resources' Activity Type couldn't allow a participant of the 'Marketing' Activity Type to do an Activity like 'Interview Candidates'.
Here is what a short list of Activities could look like. Each Activity Type has a few participants, and the supervisors are underlined:
In this team, the Administrator, Jack, has chosen to be a supervisor for the every Activity Type, but in practice, he only supervises the 'Field work' Activities.
On this page, we will show you how to configure TeemWork according to this grid.
The first step in configuring Time Management is to create the Activities and Activity Types for your team. You need the rights to 'Create new Activities' and to 'Use Time Sheets' to do this. Administrators have them by default, but you can make always change this in your User Profile.
Open the 'Activities' window (if you don't see the following menu choice, then your Profile is not properly configured).
Even if you've never created any Activities in your team, there should be a number of 'Standard' Activities in the list. To learn more about them, check out the Introduction to Time Management, and the Summaries.
To create your first Activity, click on the 'Add' button:
A window will popup, prompting you to enter the number of the new Activity. This 'number' can contain both letters and digits. Usually, it is made of the first letters of the Activity's Type, followed by a number (01 for the first, 02 for the second, ...). In our case, we want to create the Activity 'Picking up Apples', from the Activity Type 'Field Work', so the number will be 'FIE01'.
The next step is to fill out the fields at the bottom of the window. The Activity Type cannot be more than one word, so you can either remove the white spaces, or replace them by underscores ('FieldWork' or 'Field_Work').
The 'Responsibility of', 'Keywords' and 'Comments' fields are all optional.
'Responsibility of' is used only when exporting data to another software program.
'Keywords' are used when making a search in the Activity List. If someone made a search for either 'apple' of 'field', he would find this Activity.
The 'Color' of the Activity is used only on the Schedule.
Once the Activity has been saved, a list of users will appear on the right. The Participants can enter time on their Time Sheets for this Activity. By default, every user can participate to every Activity Type, but Administrators can change that (see the next section), to remove some of them completely from the Participants list.
In this example, we decide that Elmer is the only user who can pick up apples. This can be changed at a later time.
You have to repeat this procedure to add every Activity in your team. Once this is done, your users can now enter time on their Time Sheets! You can stop reading this page if this satisfies you. However, if you would like to have Supervisors in your team to manage the Activity Types, read on.
Delegating work to the Supervisors
Until now, we have assumed that the team Administrators managed all the Activities. This works well in small teams, but it becomes a burden to the Administrators when there are hundreds of users.
In this section, we will see how the Administrator can designate supervisors, who are in charge of one or more Activities. In our example, the supervisors are the underlined users in the grid at the beginning of this page.
Delegating Activity Management
To allow someone to manage Activities, you must check the 'He can create new Activities' and 'He can view Schedules and Time Sheets' checkboxes in the User Profile.
This will give him access to the 'Activities' window. However, if you only check this checkbox, the user will be able to supervise every Activity Type. In our example, we want to restrict Dilbert's powers to managing the 'Farm Administration' Activity Type (called 'FarmAdmin') . We use the 'Time Management' tab to do this:
Here is the result of this configuration: the 'Activities' window that Dilbert can use.
As you can see, he can only supervise the 'FarmAdmin' Activity Type. He could create new Activities of this Type, but not create a new Activity Type.
A user can only create a new Activity Type if he can create new Activities and he can participate to every Activity Type.
Delegating the approval and authorization of Time Sheets
Administrators can give other users the right to review and approve an employee's Time Sheets in the Time Management tab of the 'Manage Users' window. Usually, these users are the supervisors.
For example, in the following slide, user Nancy is selected. She can only enter time for the 'FarmAdmin' Activity Type, and her supervisor, Dilbert, has the right to approve her Time Sheets:
This slide also illustrates Authorization: Jack Lang, who is the Administrator of the team, wants to make sure that Dilbert correctly reviews Nancy's Time Sheets, so every time Dilbert approves a Time Sheet, it has to be further authorized by Jack Lang. In other words, an authorization is like the approval of the approval.
Entering time for an employee who does not use TeemWork
Some employees don't use computers in their daily routine. You can still use TeemWork to manage their time.
First, you have to add the employee to the team, even if he never uses TeemWork.
Second, find a TeemWork user who will enter his time. This user is usually the employee's supervisor, and he must have the right to Approve his Time Sheets (see the Time Management tab).