So your company is growing - congratulations!
As exciting as the change will be, it will necessarily lead to challenges and issues: projects multiply. Teams expand. Dependencies become complex. And suddenly, tracking team performance becomes more and more difficult.
In this post, we'll show the best practices that IT and Operations teams can put into practice, to make sure they maintain clarity, accountability, and control, without slowing teams down.
Team performance is easy to measure in the early stages of a company’s life. Teams are small, communication is direct, and there are just a few projects (or sometimes even only one!) to manage. The impact of each contributor is visible and easier to track.
But as the company grows, so does complexity. So , performance tracking gets murky. Here’s why:
Growing teams means a growing tech stack. Engineering uses Jira. Project Management is in Microsoft Planner. Sales lives in Hubspot or similar tools. And everybody tries to communicate in the MS Teams channels for a while, until eventually, they give up. Suddenly, you’re dealing with fragmented data, inconsistent reporting, and limited cross-team insight.
Spreadsheets and weekly check-ins worked with smaller teams and smaller scales. But what happens, for example, to a growing company of 200+ across different time zones? Manual tracking becomes hard to manage, inconsistent, and incredibly time-consuming.
You may be hitting deadlines, but are teams overworking? What is the quality of the work done? Are high-priority initiatives getting buried under admin tasks? Without visibility into how time is spent, optimizing or forecasting accurately is impossible.
The result? Blind spots, bottlenecks, burnout. And decisions made without data.
When you have an idea of where the finish line lies, you need to know how to get there. You should know what metrics and KPIs should be tracked to measure progress as well as success. But forget about vanity metrics, like hours logged and the number of tasks completed. Focus on both qualitative and quantitative metrics that matter. Are milestones being reached? Are tasks completed with quality and consistency? Are time and resources used effectively, or are there delays? and so on.
As we mentioned before, manual timesheets, or scattered dashboards, won't help you as your team scales fast. The right performance tracking tools should give you real-time insight into how teams work—without slowing them down. In addition, you should look for platforms that integrate with your existing stack (like Microsoft 365, for example), automate time tracking, and keep data at you fingertips.
Dashboards, dashboards, dashboards! No busy managers should waste time chasing around reports, making sense of scattered data, and log in a myriad of tools every day and every quarter to draw the updates they need.
A good performance dashboard should show:
This helps you get real-time visibility to make proactive decisions for resources and risks.
Once you have all your metrics, dashboards and tracking set up, avoid the trap of over-focusing on individual productivity. Instead, zoom out. Make sure you have the big picture in mind.
Is this team delivering projects reliably? Is their capacity aligned with the roadmap? Are we over-scheduling or under-scheduling specific individuals? Focusing on the team as a unit reduces micromanagement, empowers team leads to self-optimize, and boosts accountability.
Don't waste your time with repetitive tasks that steal away your time and focus.
Need to pull out certain data? Schedule automated reports. Need regular team updates? Set a regular, recurring event on a shared calendar and invite your team to attend. Need to track time and approve of other people's submissions? Use time tracking tools that don't disrupt workflows and fit seamlessly with your current tech stack.
Let’s talk practical solutions.
Timeneye is a time tracking and productivity platform designed for scaling tech companies. It’s built to give Ops leaders real-time visibility into how teams spend their time, without adding process overhead. Here’s why it’s a great fit for companies like yours:
As your company grows, adopting best practices for tracking team performance is crucial to maintain clarity, accountability, and control. Focus on meaningful metrics, leverage the right tools, centralize tracking systems, and automate repetitive processes to overcome scaling challenges.
Solutions like Timeneye offer seamless integration, real-time dashboards, and easy adoption, helping you gain insights and lead effectively!
Discover the best methods for tracking employee hours and boosting productivity, from traditional timesheets to advanced time tracking software.
These time tracking best practices for employees will make keeping track of time less of a pain. Better time tracking means better productivity!
How do time tracking and project management go together? Tracking time contribute to a project's success, that reflect both on employees and managers.