Time Tracking: Why Standard Time is important to project management
This chapter is about the features and benefits of the
Standard Time® product. Hopefully the discussion will
benefit you in your quest for better product development and
project management practices.
It's probably wise to begin by understanding why people
track time and project status. There are a lot of reasons.
People recognize that time is a limited resource, that once
used it cannot be recovered. Making good use of time leads to
financial benefits. That's common knowledge, but what's more
elusive is how to analyze your time, and make simple and
applicable use of what you discover. Few people are good at
that. For many people it's just too hard to even try. However,
for those who do, they are usually trying to gather more
information about their own use of time, and on a broader
scale, the use of entire teams of people. Peering into this
murky well of knowledge is a tiresome task. The impetus that
invokes such an undertaking in the first place is usually
based on financial or competitive pressures. These are outside
pressures forcing you to improve your process in an effort to
survive. Only those willing to improve survive. Goals need to
be met, market pressures bear down, poor project track records
haunt, and customers demand proper accounting. These are the
reasons people are forced into the uninvited charge of
tracking time. Failing to do so defaults the benefits to those
who do.
The current state of technology for tracking project status
is still in its infancy. Unfortunately, it is still a somewhat
manual process, and one that many people decline to engage in.
People attempt to use project-scheduling products like
Microsoft Project to schedule tasks. Ninety percent of the
time, these schedules are created once, and never updated
because tasks change far too frequently and it's hard to keep
up. Tracking project status is nearly impossible because the
tasks for a given project will almost all change by the time
the project is finished. Keeping up with all those tasks is a
manual labor nightmare. It's also pretty hard to track time to
tasks or projects because you must baby-sit a time tracking
product all the while. As I stated earlier, this is the
current state of technology, not the final result. Just as
word processing became a no-brainer, time tracking will evolve
to the point where it meets the required needs without all the
hard work. We're getting there.
Time tracking benefits product development in several ways.
It goes beyond knowing how long things take. Projects usually
must meet certain budget and time targets to ensure
profitability. Tracking time for all resources involved in the
project gives you a fair idea of the ongoing status. If a
project is broken down into phases, you can practice phase
containment to reduce thrash and measure the effect your
choices make in subsequent phases. Measuring this time also
lets you make a postmortem analysis of project anatomy - where
all that time goes. Understanding this gives you a leg up on
the competition.
Standard Time offers several interconnected
"views" of your time data. The Project Task view
offers a hierarchical view of all project tasks in the
project. Each task rolls up certain fields like duration,
actual work, remaining work, and percent complete to the
subsystem and project level so that you see project status at
a glance. Projects and subsystems are listed in order with
project tasks below them. They may be collapsed and expanded
to show detail as needed. A timesheet view is convenient for
people who would rather estimate each day's work in a
spreadsheet style layout rather than use a precise timer.
Using this view may reduce the fidelity of the data you
collect, but some data is better than no data. A Time Log view
shows the historical record of all time that has been logged.
Most of the reports are based on this data since it contains
the honest historical truth about what has happened in the
project. This is the data you'll likely use to analyze your
projects. Mileage and expense tracking is also available to
help round out the tracking of project status. The complete
picture of project time and expenses is sometimes necessary.
Client invoicing is based upon time that has been logged and
expenses incurred. These basic features can be used by one-man
companies or large teams to collect time that is useful for
analysis.
Standard Time can be used to learn about time usage. Track
your time on every thing you do. This gives you the raw
materials to look for the connections between strategy and
tactics. Try to find the optimal mix of time spent on
strategy, tactics, and administrative overhead that result in
actual work performed. Once you obtain a "baseline"
analysis for yours, and your team's performance, try to
squeeze out additional performance by shifting time to
different priorities. This is an experiment that takes time to
perfect. After looking into the microscope of time tracking
for a while, you may be a little bug-eyed, but you'll start to
see patterns of performance that are directly related to your
mix of priorities. You'll discover the optimal mix of process
overhead necessary to reduce thrash. You'll find the amount of
time you can spend on each release cycle to optimize quality,
customer satisfaction, and employee morale. You'll discover
how much time is actually spent on administrative overhead and
downtime. You'll find relationships between QA polish time and
product quality. You'll learn about task context switching
time and the need for focused REM development. You'll be able
to meet market windows by reducing functionality that doesn't
matter, and spend more time focusing on customer priorities.
These are the benefits of tracking time!
Have you seen the InfoWorld
2004 article on tech compensation?
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