Are you trying to weigh out all pros and cons of using time tracking software in your organization? You are probably wondering how to make it work and earn your team’s trust in this solution.
Read these seven ways on how time-tracking can make managing projects easier, improve your company’s cash flow, and get your team excited about using a time-tracking tool.
With time tracking software you can easily identify bottlenecks. If your colleague is spending too much time writing an article, it is probably happening for a reason. For example, the article topic is too difficult having no match with the knowledge and skills of the person to whom you have assigned the task. It can also happen because there is confusion on what the article should contain.
In both cases, it is worth tracking the tasks your team is working on to quickly intervene if some take too much time to finish. Often, clarifying the tasks and talking about them with that person can help find a more time-efficient way to deal with the problem.
Using time tracking software internally helps organize remote teams. If you are currently looking to switch to remote work or maintain a healthy hybrid team, time tracking is indispensable to agree on realistic deadlines for all tasks.
By setting up deadlines, you will encourage your employees to take tasks more seriously and help them stay more productive while working from home.
According to Parkinson’s law saying “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. People tend to spend more time on a task with longer deadlines. So why spend more time on the project?
The thing is you can’t estimate what deadline can be deemed realistic without data. That’s where time tracking software can help.
To set the right deadline, you can look back at your historical data of similar tasks or projects to understand how much time that task or project can take.
With a time tracking tool all this data is at your fingertips.
Did you know that an average employee is productive for only 2 hours 33 minutes during an 8-hour day? That’s because there are so many petty things that suddenly pop up!
While these small tasks eat out a lot of your team’s time, they don’t contribute to more revenue. However, you can prevent them from happening by identifying the most time-consuming tasks as fast as possible.
The knowledge of where your team’s time goes gives you a chance to teach your employees on becoming more productive.
This is possible only by cutting down the activities and tasks that eat out the most time, but which don’t translate into more revenue.
So what is the first step to eliminating such activities?
Taking a look at the projects breakdown and the persons assigned to them is the first step to make.
Along with HR management software, time tracking tools can help learn who in your team is the most productive and reward them for their effort. You could reward by giving a pay raise for a major achievement or a cinema ticket for a smaller one.
By recognizing your team’s effort, you can also encourage less organized employees to put in a bit more effort next time.
For example, you can export your team’s timesheet with a project breakdown or send it to your team’s inbox for later analysis as in the example below.
In such reports, you can find pie charts or graphics that show a breakdown in a visual way making it easier to understand all details.
Apart from rewarding your employees, with time tracking, you can follow a workflow for retrospects much easier. By introducing weekly or monthly retrospects on all tasks, together with your team, you can identify those that eat out the most time and prepare a plan for eliminating distractions. Also, you can encourage them to look for tools or hacks for automating labor-intensive tasks to make their life easier and work – more productive.
When you know where your time goes, you can identify the projects that don’t bring the ROI you want to achieve. Also, by understanding what clients bring the most revenue, you can focus on delivering more work for them while saying “no” to unprofitable enterprises.
By analyzing your teams’ timesheets against the revenue each client brings, you can learn what projects are the most profitable and who your ideal persona is. Then, you can come up with a plan to acquire more such clients and make sure your sales are focused on that client segment instead of wasting their time on bringing projects that, at best, break even.
You can also help your sales team in acquiring more profitable projects by warming up relations with the leads you currently have in your marketing funnel. For this, you could use email marketing tools or retarget them with paid ads.
We tend to underestimate the time needed to deliver a project. It’s called a planning fallacy. This is the problem that software development agencies often face because there are always plenty of unknowns when it comes to developing a product and building a tech team to deliver it. What usually happen if you give the wrong project estimate to your clients? Let’s see an example.
Imagine you mentioned to a client that your team would need 40 hours to deliver a project. As your team faced a technical problem, they ended up spending 60 hours in total.
The two things can happen in this situation. Your client will pay for the 40 hours you estimated as a project duration leaving you with diminishing margins. You can also send a client a final report asking to pay for an extra 20 hours on top of the price agreed upon in the beginning. Do you think the client would like such a turn of action?
It is likely they would reconsider business relations with you and choose another company that provides them with more precise project estimates. So how time management software can help make more accurate estimates?
With time management software, you can analyze the historical data from previous projects to build more precise estimates. By documenting your team’s time, nothing will go through the cracks! When reading timesheets, you get access to hard data which can be a better starting point for assessment than an assumption coming off the top of your head.
Introducing a time tracking solution in your organization offers a handful of advantages that translate into better cash flow and faster growth. Now, it’s time to choose the right tool to help make it happen
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