“What's everyone spending their time on?” How to handle your boss’s questions about project status.
Tempo Team
It’s hard to imagine a more stressful scenario at work: Your boss approaches you and asks, “How are all our projects coming along? What’s their overall financial impact this year – and next year?”
For project managers and team leads, these are complicated questions to answer! You might have to run multiple reports, access disparate systems, try to standardize numbers across departments, and slog through spreadsheets.
It might take weeks to get a good answer, and by then, the report is already outdated.
What if you could answer your boss’s questions about project governance in an instant? What if a simple click to a dashboard could banish that stress forever? With the right processes and tools in place, that scenario is within reach.
The critical need to govern and audit development and operating costs
Tech companies invest an enormous amount of resources into software development – whether that’s time, salaries, or cloud infrastructure. At the same time, pressure has been on the rise to account for how that investment is being governed.
Economic uncertainty, regulatory scrutiny, executive demands for transparency, and the complexities of remote work have driven the need to justify where money and time are being spent.
The goal isn’t to cut costs. It’s to ensure that every dollar spent is contributing to business value.
Poor governance leads to risks, such as budget overruns inaccurate financial reporting, misallocated resources, and bad decision making.
Good governance, by contrast, has clear benefits:
Transparency and visibility: A well-governed project stays on track. Teams can stay focused on the top priorities, with individuals allocated to the projects where they’re needed most. Stakeholders have visibility into projects – in real time – at a level that’s appropriate to their roles.
Resource control: A well-governed project stays on budget. Budget issues in one project can have a cascading financial impact on the rest of the business.
Preparedness: A well-governed project anticipates bottlenecks. Whether that means accounting for planned vacations for key players months down the road, or unplanned market events, good project governance allows a business to quickly pivot and adapt.
There’s no linear path to good project governance, but there are seven pillars that can support incremental progress.
7 pillars of effective project governance
Data hygiene: Ensure you’re working with accurate, up-to-date project data.
Expense tracking: Monitor costs, people power, and time spent.
Time tracking: Understand what your team is working on to improve financial governance and ensure billing accuracy.
Work traceability: Attribute expenses to projects, teams, or accounts.
Capacity planning and management: Improve project delivery, reduce downtime, and prevent burnout.
Financial management: Have real-time budget visibility and prevent overspend.
Reporting and auditing: Improve transparency, accountability, and compliance.
Let’s dig into how to apply these pillars and strengthen project governance on your team and across the business. Time to answer your boss’s questions about projects with confidence!
Question 1: What are people spending their time on?
When your boss wants to know how team members are spending their time, you need access to accurate data. Not everyone looks forward to filling out timesheets, but tracking time accurately prevents waste, avoids missed deadlines, and enables you to make predictions about future projects [link to Skoda cs].
How to answer this question: Use a time-tracking tool like Timesheets to gain a clear view into where time is being spent. With its AI-assisted features and calendar integrations, using Timesheets can make it less painful for teams to track their hours accurately.
With better time data available, you can keep teams focused on top-priority tasks, or gain a clearer understanding of hiring needs to achieve core business goals.
Timesheets also makes it easier to separate CapEx and OpEx work, which helps with paying vendors, claiming tax credits, compliance, and auditing.
Question 2: How many projects are currently in flight?
Knowing how many projects are active in your division, region, or across the business helps clarify where resources are concentrated (and if anything needs to be reprioritized).
How to answer this question: Visualize all current projects in one place using Custom Charts for Jira or the Gantt Charts add-on for Structure PPM. Taking a high-level view shows how all projects are tracking and how the interdependencies relate.
Question 3: Are all projects on track, and are there bottlenecks?
Every project manager dreads hearing, “Why wasn’t I informed about this delay?” Staying ahead of potential issues ensures you can proactively notify your boss before bottlenecks derail progress.
How to answer this question: Use check-ins and sprint retrospectives to audit project status. And try tools like Capacity Planner to make sure team members aren’t overextended.
Most importantly, try predictive scheduling or scenario modeling with Portfolio Manager to predict a project’s completion date with nearly 100% confidence.
Question 4: What is the financial impact of all projects?
This is one of the most critical questions because it reveals how your project portfolio is performing relative to the cost of work.
How to address this question: Gain real-time budget visibility by replacing static spreadsheets with real-time cost tracking software like Financial Manager, for a start. Make sure you can track both monetary and non-monetary costs (e.g. time and resources) to each project.
Such financial governance ensures that every dollar is accounted for while reinforcing the importance of aligning spending with business goals.
Tools for the job
Now that you know the questions and how to address them, what makes it all manageable? Modern tools, like the Tempo suite, help you stay ahead of inquiries. Here's how:
Timesheets enables visibility into team effort.
Capacity Planner ensures you’re optimizing workloads.
Structure PPM gives you rollup views across multiple projects.
Financial Manager tracks budgets seamlessly.
Custom Charts consolidates key metrics into live dashboards.
BI Connectors feed near-real-time information into BI tools for deeper analysis.
These solutions are integrated directly into Jira, making it possible to align strategy with day-to-day work. Just as importantly, Tempo’s solutions are modular so teams can start with their greatest need and build on success. Alongside good project governance practices, these tools create a foundation for precise, high-level decision making.
Putting it all together
When your boss asks about the status of your projects, they’re looking for more than just bare-bones updates. They want assurance that workflows are smooth, finances are under control, and resources are being used strategically. By focusing on governance, financial insight, and proactive planning, you’ll not only answer their questions convincingly but also elevate your role as an indispensable leader.
If you’re ready to streamline your project management and produce these results, explore how Tempo can help.
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