Time Tracking

What do we learn from tracking our time?

So @ my company, we've always done some level of "time tracking" but not across the board by all staff. That is, in the early days, up until early 2002, we only booked time spent on client submitted requests and that time was only booked one person. What I eventually learned was that a programmer spent time reading the request, meeting about it, doing the work, testing, and then re-testing and in the end, would only book a fraction of the time.

One day, I changed the "rules" and decided staff would record their entire day of time. (And if they had nothing to do, they booked their time against an activity of "nothing"). What happened was interesting and instantaneous: time spent on specific requests increased two-fold. And it had a dramatic impact on our business, not necessarily in revenue (we generally charge a flat rate on the request, not by the hour) because it helped us to understand how long specific tasks really took - not just by the programmer, but by the staff managers submitting and managing the workload and schedules.

The perception and expectations changed. Instead of us underestimating a request and potentially missing a deadline, the understanding of the work was based on a historical reality and it allowed us to move from being a company that over promised and under-delivered, we shifted to a more proactive company in terms of our client deliverables. This didn't happen overnight. It took time and a lot of analysis. And that came from effectively managing and recording our time thru time tracking systems. And it came by challenging each other. No one wants to tell a client something will be done on Tuesday only to be a week or even a day late with that expectation.

It's pretty rare for us to miss a stated deadline even on complex programming requests and it's been like that for many, many years. I think our solid infrastructure has a lot to do with that and that has a lot to do with how we measure our work internally. We don't just "do." We are constantly looking at each request and the numbers behind it. And we record the time spent against it. If we thought something was going to take a certain number of hours and it took more time, we learn from that. We don't make the same mistake twice....or at least we try not to.

Don't get me wrong. Time tracking systems are difficult to set up effectively and even more difficult to get full "buy-in" from the staff. There's always a few staff in every barrel that resists entering in their time. I think there are many reasons for this: They think it's a waste of time; they feel their time is too important to be spent recording it; they have ADD and "forget" because something shiny came along; it's too big brother-y -- (I've hit them all) but more often than not, they just don't understand the importance of it.

Most folks in the world are not "business people" and part of running a business is understanding what you do, how you do it, why you do it and how all of that benefits your customers. We don't track time because it's a fun little excercise. We track time because we want to know how we spend our time given our existing conditions (staffing, client/customer needs) and where we can do better, where we need to spend more time, where we're spending too much time that isn't cost-effective.

For example, if you measure the quality of your work (as we do) in errors (and hopefully lack thereof) and you see an decrease in quality of work -- you can often trace that back to time tracking indicators. In our company we strive for 100 percent accuracy in all work output and when there is a mistake made (even a small one) we analyze that -- we trace it back to the exact number of hours spent on the work behind it. Did the person not spend enough time on the request? Too much time? How was his or her other time spent in that same time frame -- where they working on too many tasks? Were other people involved in Quality Control, if so who and what other time was spent by that person in the same time frame?

There's a lot to be learned in effective time tracking and management. And that isn't just for the worker bees. Managers and CEO's (like me) need to track their time. Especially CEO's like me... who flit from one project to another depending on mood. I started tracking my time a month ago (yes, I know....I am a little late to the game here) when I expanded our time tracking to all staff (that is, all staff must record their schedules) and in just one month, I have learned a great deal about how I actually spend my time. I am not so fond of my results thus far, but I am not just recording my time for the sake of a fun little excercise, I am doing it so I can understand my strengths and weakness as a CEO in relation to my perceived role in the company and what it means to our overall growth.

Anyway, this is my little rant for today.