For those of you who still don’t know what TacticSheet is – TacticSheet is a Free and Open Source Timesheet and Expense Tracking system. If you want more information about TacticSheet you can click here.

I've been busy at work for the last couple of weeks. I've also been traveling for a couple of days last week primarily for work but none the less, we’ve been putting in quite a bit of time every weekend on TacticSheet. I'm happy to say that TacticSheet is slowly and steadily starting to shape up decently well.  For the last two weeks we were a little slow at adding new features but we've been taking one step at a time and making sure we don't burn out in the long marathon ahead.

Here are some new features that have been rolled out based on the work we did last weekend and this weekend:

Introduction of 'Clients'

TacticSheet now allows you to add your clients to the system. Once you’ve done this, while adding a project TacticSheet will let you group and create project under a given client. In the long run this is supposed to allow us to answer multiple questions. For Example:

1. How many clients does my organization have?
2. How many projects are under each client?
3. How many employees are dedicatedly working for a client?
4. How many man-hours has the organization put in behind one client and their multiple projects?

Adding the concept of allowing you to add clients in the system and then group projects under each client opens up a host of possibilities for TacticSheet in the future. We're also hoping that it would help integrate with accounting and billing systems in the long run.

Introduction of 'Tasks'

For a day job, to earn my daily bread and butter, I work at an awesome software shop. We estimate each task for a project that we work on. Then we let folks take ownership of the task and work on the task. Once the tasks complete we go ahead and compare the estimated time with the Actual Time taken and this comparison allows us to get better at our future estimations.

Now TacticSheet allows you to store tasks under each project and allows employees to file their time against a task instead of a project.

This is supposed to open up new dimensions for TacticSheet once we move into reporting. Having this data in place will allow TacticSheet to answer questions like:

1. How many employees worked on a given task?
2. How many man-hours of work went into a given task?
3. Which task in the project took the maximum amount of effort to complete?

Percentage Allocation and Percentage Criticality Captured During Allocation

In the last check-in we added the ability for enhanced employee allocation to projects into TacticSheet. In this check-in we also allow you to capture additional facts about the allocation:

1. Percentage Allocation of the Employee – In a lot of organizations I’ve seen employees being allocated to more than one project at a given time. Now in TacticSheet, while allocating an employee to a project you can not only choose the time-line for which he will be allocated to the project but you will also be allowed to pick the percentage of his time you typically want him to give against the project.
2. Percentage Criticality of the Employee – In a lot of organizations I’ve seen employees being assigned to a project to complete ad-hoc tasks. At times I’ve also seen employees being assigned to a project because they’re on the bench and having nothing else to do :) – Now in TacticSheet, while assigning an employee to the project for a given duration you can also choose the criticality of the employee to the project. A high criticality indicates that moving the employee out of the project might considerably impact the project and a low criticality indicates that the person can be moved to another project if he is really needed in a different project. In other words, a low criticality indicates that the employee is not critical in the project and moving him from the current project will have no or very little impact on the current project.

Minor Bug Fixes

An issue with TacticSheet with multiple connection strings being used by TacticSheet was reported in this thread of our mailing technology mailing list. We’ve gone ahead and fixed it.

What’s next?

More Features - good software is never complete and we’ve hardly started yet. More features, posts and goodness coming up! Stay tuned!