By the end of this video, you will be able to:
- Know why time tracking is important
- Know where to start when trying to tackle the organizational change needed for successful time tracking
- Configure the system to be able to support actual time entry
Why is Time Tracking Important?
- Reporting
- Tracking time can in short allow you to:
- Track the present
- Report the past
- Estimate the future
- It can enhance our ability to estimate for future activities since we can juxtapose estimates vs actuals on past activities in TDX
- Can demonstrate the human capital costs for work efforts to help drive informed decision making
- Ability to show where people are overworked/underworked
- Reduce the chance of scope creep because costs related to time can be monitored
- Ability to distinguish between time spent running the organization vs growing the organization vs transforming the organization
- It can also help ensure deliverables are rendered more reliably as your estimates get better with more historical data
"Culture Eats Process For Breakfast"
- Managing organization change for time tracking is crucial to its success
- Consult with functional managers and employees to garnish their feedback on what they believe they want to see from time tracking
- Also, be sure to identify any stakeholders that may react negatively and take special steps to engage them/garnish their feedback
- Minimal Viable Product, keep it simple to start
- What does executive leadership believe the minimum outputs to be in order to be successful with time tracking?
- This will drive your requirements/configuration
- Since we know that culture eats process for breakfast, we need to let the culture adjust with something simple, and then perhaps add complexity later
- TD employees themselves have always tracked at least 40 hours or more of time in our system, and it has become so ubiquitous to us, that no on at HQ even worries about it
- Time Tracking needs to be a "Top Down Initiative"
- Executive leadership needs to communicate the value in this, and then enforce it moving forward
- The sub levels underneath executive leadership needs to re-enforce the initiative as well
- Downplay the typically negative 'big brother' connotations
- We are not looking for reasons to fire people, its most likely to prove how busy we are so that we can hire
Action Items in TDX for Time Tracking
- Take the last 2 slides into account
- Decide how granular time needs to be to start
- Decide if you want to track time on:
- Tickets
- Need ticket types to create tickets
- Projects
- Need project types to create projects
- Operations
- Need workspaces that are backed by project types
- Define Time Types in admin
- Define project/ticket types in admin
- Associate Time Types to Project/Ticket Types
- Train users on how to enter time using one of the many paths in the system for their tickets/and or projects
- Report using several different methods found inside the Analysis application