How different types of teams use Timetracker?
Timetracker for Jira provides an easy and fast solution for effective daily time tracking and reporting options to help you analyze your team’s work. In most cases, it is not the users who proactively log their work, but the companies that require employees to track their time. In this article, we would like to collect the benefits of Timetracker for different teams and why it is useful.
Software Teams
Nowadays, almost all the software teams work in Agile. There are development sprints where the issues are collected that the group will work on in the next 1-4 weeks. Before starting a sprint there is a planning phase where the business and development teams gather together to prioritize the tasks and discuss the available resources. There are multiple ways to specify the team’s velocity. Besides story points, time estimation is still very common and widely used. When all the prioritized issues have their required time estimated they will be moved to the next sprint until there is no more available resource there.
Needless to say, planning is never 100% accurate and it never will, but it can be improved! Time tracking is a good way to do that. All the users have to do is log how much time they spent on their issues. From that, you will be able to see what was the estimated and actual time on all the issues, and if there is a big difference you can discuss it and iterate next time. Timetracker has several reporting features to help you do that!
Let’s see one example. We, Everit Kft. working just as described above. Here are the numbers from our first 3 sprint:
| Total Estimated time on Issues | Total Logged time on Issues | |
|---|---|---|
| First Sprint | 204 Hours | 241.11 Hours |
| Second Sprint | 289 Hours | 277.41 Hours |
| Third Sprint | 247 Hours | 240.91 Hours |
As you can see, the estimation and actual time not only did it get closer but your actual logged time was less than your estimate in the second and third! This is a big help for project managers in their daily work.
Controlling Teams
The project management triangle is a model of the constraints of project management. The quality of work is constrained by the project’s budget, deadlines, and scope. For example, a project can be completed faster by increasing budget or cutting scope. Similarly, increasing scope may require equivalent increases in budget and schedule. Cutting budget without adjusting schedule or scope will lead to lower quality. Tracking the cost of labor work is needed to make important project decisions like changing the scope or extending the deadline and so on. Timetracker can help you to monitor the resources spent on a project. How? It has a built-in cost rate feature. What does that mean? Users with Wage Manager permission (which is a feature that can be set in Timetracker permission settings) are able to define hourly cost rates for each Jira user or default cost rate for all the users. After setting up the correct values, you will be able to check the cost of worklogs, issues, project etc.
HR Teams
Timetracker can help HR Teams in many ways. Checking the worklogs occasionally can reveal valuable information on employees. Significant changes in a user’s log (not as well detailed as before, focusing less and less on a project) could mean decreased motivation or even a conflict with other coworkers. Try to focus on the ‘why the user logged this way’ question instead of ‘what the user worked on’. Monitoring this information and discussing them during a one-on-one can show the employee that they are a valued part of the company and can bring personal problems to the surface. They will be more committed to the team and to the project if they feel that a team lead/manager actually cares about their well-being.
If you configured the ‘Number of working hour per day’ setting in the Jira Time tracking page then you will be able to check in the Timetracker’s Missing Day report if someone didn’t meet the requirement for certain days. This way, HR colleagues are able to monitor employees.
Business Teams
Project and product managers have to plan, track, and execute their projects on an ongoing basis and adjust to problems in real-time. Timetracker’s reporting features help users meet deadlines and budgets by providing quick, detailed reports. It is also necessary to see the numbers before every crucial decision. You can check these in multiple views, export them, save these filters, and even share it with your colleagues with a simple URL link!
Support Teams
After installing Timetracker for Cloud, you will be able to log your work in Service Desk Issues as well! This way, the team will be able to monitor bigger issues, check the workload within the team, and reorganize tasks if needed. Improving the work method of Support Teams will result in a better team satisfaction, increases the quality of work, and improves the overall SLA.
Conclusion
Tracking time is never a fun thing to do. It is a good idea to inform the employees that it is not for micro-managing them but to increase the efficiency of a team that may help the company to reach its desired goals. Timetracker is available for Jira Cloud, Server & Data Center.
