Project Server Help Blog

Time Tracking Stinks

Let's face it... nobody likes to track their time. It's not fun, it's inconvenient, and it provides very little value for most of the thousands upon thousands of people who are asked to do it every day / week / month. It's not extremely difficult or time consuming to do in most cases, but nonetheless it still stinks. Whether they are using paper-and-pencil timesheets, Project Server timesheets, or another third party timesheet tool, I bet that most people would be tickled pink to hear that they never need to perform this boring and tedious task ever again.

It Stinks, But We Need It

On the other hand, I doubt that anyone in our community would deny the benefits of capturing data that describes how people spend their working time. We need it to status project and operational work, we need it to justify headcounts, and we need it to bill our customers... just to name a few reasons. If captured consistently and completely, the data can be extremely valuable:

• What if you discovered that your personnel currently spend 30% of their time on projects? What if you could increase it to 50%?
• What if you discovered that some of your personnel are 90% billable, but others are only 20% billable?
• What if you discovered that the average work week within your department / business unit is 65 hours? What if you discovered that it is 32 hours?

Let's Be Innovative!

Until someone in a laboratory discovers a way to tap directly into our brains and record what we are thinking and doing throughout the workday, an interim solution would be extremely helpful. This solution should address the age-old problem of time tracking... the need to capture the data to manage and improve the business, while at the same time making it effortless for the company personnel to capture. After all, if we ask our personnel to follow a process or utilize a tool that is confusing or tedious, then we will most likely end up with a garbage-in, garbage-out situation.

Many existing solutions are merely slight variations from one another; a timesheet consisting of a list of tasks or activities shown in a table or form, with daily or weekly columns for entering how much time was spent on each. A truly innovative solution would cast aside any existing time tracking paradigms... no more timesheets, no more typing work hours into a form, and no more waiting until the end of the day / week / month to capture the data.

One example is a shop floor solution in which an employee swipes their ID card when they begin working at a station or work center, then swipe again when they leave the station. A system automatically tracks the amount of time that the person spent performing that activity... no manual time entry required.

With the widespread use of mobile phones, RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags, text messaging, social networking tools, and other emerging technologies, we should be able to invent some very interesting methods of tracking our company time.

Crowdsourcing the Solution

In an effort to crack open the time tracking problem that so many companies have, I would like to engage the community to do some brainstorming. Here are a few thought starters to get the conversation rolling:

• What specific aspects of time tracking stink?
• What types of working and non-working time need to be captured?
• How accurate does the data need to be?
• How granular does the data need to be?
• How often does the data need to be captured?
• How often does the data need to be submitted?
• Is it better for people to manually enter the data into a tool?
• Is it better for a tool to automatically ask people for the data?
• Where should the data be captured?
• What types of devices should people use to capture the data?
• Should it be a stand-alone tool, or embedded within other software / tools?
• Should the tool utilize social networking platforms?

Please leave your ideas, suggestions, and other comments here.

Thanks!