If you are interested in a free open source Timesheet and Expense-sheet tracking system built on C# 3.0, .NET 3.5, LINQ and Orcas Beta 2, you should checkout TacticSheet. A couple of weeks we announced a development version of TacticSheet live. You can read that announcement and learn more about TacticSheet here. We also published our First New Features Announcement Last Week and announced a couple of new features which are expected to add a lot of power to TacticSheet when we move to our first release.
If you're a .NET developer you could go grab a copy of the latest TacticSheet code from TacticSheet Source Forge SVN and start playing around with it. You can also go ahead and join our General Mailing List or the TacticSheet Technology Mailing List.
A lot of new ideas have started coming. I’m bubbling with ideas myself and new ideas are also being thrown at me by folks who are interested in using TacticSheet when it reaches a release ready stage. We’re taking one step at a time and adding a few new features every weekend. Here’s what we’ve added to TacticSheet this weekend:
Enhanced Resource Allocation while Creating Projects
While allocating employees to Project it was natural for me to provide a Move-List in the Edit Project / Project Creation screen so that you would be able to allocate employees to project:
At the first glance the idea seemed good enough for the basic project allocation requirement that we had and made a lot of sense. You could allocate employees to a project and they would work on the project till the project ended. If you wanted to stop employees from filing Timesheets pertaining to that project you could remove them from the project team.
Apparently, it looks like people who have been using commercial timesheets for a long time feel that this is the biggest pain-point of some of the commercial timesheet entry systems.
A commercial timesheet entry system I looked at while playing around with the idea of writing TacticSheet seem to be doing exactly the same thing I did initially with TacticSheet, which is to allow you to either assign employee(s) to a project or unassigned employee(s) from a project.
Last week someone who saw TacticSheet and had used a couple of other timesheet entry was very helpful in giving feedback. He brought it to our notice that In reality, organizations tend to be much more dynamic. Here are some scenarios where the basic assumption that if employees are assigned to a project, they will work on the project during the entire span of that project, creates a nightmare for the administrators:
- An Employee will need to work on the project just for the first three months of the project.
- An Employee will need to join the project three months after the project started and will work only for two more months after which he will need to be moved from that project into another project.
- An employee will be allocated to a project and will work for two weeks in that project. Then he will be moved out of the project and will be needed again for two weeks, three months later.
A couple of commercial Timesheet entry systems I saw while playing around with the idea of building TacticSheet just allow you to either add employee(s) to a project or remove employee(s) from a project when they are no longer needed. Which means in case of the above scenarios administrators would find themselves manually remembering (or relying on emails sent by Project Managers) to add and remove resources from a given project.
One of our goals while creating TacticSheet was also to provide a Timesheet System with the Infrastructure that will allow folks integrate TacticSheet with external systems and consume the Timesheet data from multiple other systems.
When I think of a full blown Resource Management System talking to TacticSheet, the whole idea of adding resources to a project for the entire course of the project and not letting the administrator choose for how long an employee would work on a project, sounds fundamentally wrong.
This weekend we ended up addressing this issue and we seem to have solved it rather elegantly.
TacticSheet now offers a separate Project Allocation screen. This screen allows you to add an employee to a project which is what most commercial timesheet entry systems also allow you to do.
The same screen also offers an advanced allocation option - which allows you to pick the exact dates or range of dates for which the employee will be involved with the project. You can add the sample employee to the project multiple times by choosing different start dates and end dates as long as these start dates and end dates don’t overlap for the same employee.
The screen allows you to address all three scenarios I described above using TacticSheet.
The same feature is also going to allow us to give you a lot of other additional kick-ass features in the future. For example, storing this data will allow TacticSheet to look into the future and see how many guys are really busy and for what time durations. Having this data there opens up a new dimension of reporting for us and will let us do some awesome reports primarily on the Resource allocation side in the future.
More features, goodness and posts coming up in the future. We have barely started, and are far from done. Stay tuned for more!
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