Contents

For Architects

For Media, Marketing and PR

For Human Resource Consultants and Subscription Managers

Using SAGE Coretime Timesheet Software with DSDM Atern

SAGE Coretime with PRINCE2

For Architects

Coretime has a number of features that make it particularly suitable for an Architects office.

• Workstages can be applied to projects. These can be either the default RIBA Workstages or your own custom-designed versions. Use Coretime Project Phases to represent the Workstages.
• Phases (your workstages) can be created from Project Templates or on-the-fly for a specific project
• New or additional phases (workstages) can be quickly and easily added to existing Projects
• Fee forecasting can be done using SAGE Coretime’s Fee Allocation system and associated reports
• Alert thresholds can be set against Projects or Project Phases to proactively alert Project Managers (by email) when a Project is straying over budget
• Client-led variations can be easily tracked and, where appropriate, invoiced
• SAGE Coretime Timesheet Software can link to both SAGE 50 and SAGE 200 Accounts systems as well as SAGE CRM, so that financial and contact information never need to be entered twice
• Employees can be allocated to Projects to assist with resource planning
• SAGE Coretime can link to MS Project for more sophisticated project planning
• A comprehensive set of reports exist to analyse Business, Client, Project and Employee performance from various perspectives

Use SAGE Coretime Project Phases to represent calendar months. Set a total budget revenue value against this monthly retainer. You can then see immediately whether you are over-servicing a client.

For Human Resource Consultants and Subscription Managers

Enter your monthly billing schedule as a series of provisional invoices and convert to real invoices during your billing procedures. Budgeting against this monthly revenue will highlight if you are incurring undue costs against this revenue stream.

Using SAGE Coretime with DSDM Atern

DSDM Atern (from www.dsdm.org) is a project management regime that has been developed since 1994 as a framework for the delivery of on-budget and on-time Information technology (IT) projects. Atern can be used in conjunction with Prince2^TM (see below) without duplication of effort.Each Atern project has a life-cycle that can be represented in a SAGE Coretime project phase. Costs and expenses can be allocated to each of these life-cycle stages. Pre- and post- project phases can be defined in Coretime so that a total appraisal of project profitability (or costs) can be obtained.

SAGE Coretime with PRINCE2

PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a process-based method for effective project management. It is used extensively by the UK Government and has become a de facto standard in the private and public sectors, both in the UK and internationally. PRINCE2 is in the public domain, offering non-proprietary best practice guidance on project management and is a registered trademark of OGC.The key features of PRINCE2 are:-

• Its focus on business justification
• A defined organisation structure for the project management team
• Its product-based planning approach
• Its emphasis on dividing the project into manageable and controllable stages
• Its flexibility to be applied at a level appropriate to the project.

Using Project Phases, SAGE Coretime is able to support a typical PRINCE2^TM process stage sequence of the following type:-

• Project Initialization
• Software Installation
• System Commissioning
• Go Live

In each stage, PRINCE2^TM processes can be defined as SAGE Coretime Activities so that performance can be compared across projects.