How to improve time-tracking culture in your organization

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Time is a primary component of how to measure team effectiveness. If your organization runs Scrum, the velocity formula includes a time frame. If Kanban, then it's again about the speed during some period. SLA management, it's again about time. Managers should organize the process to have data on how their teams perform. The challenge here is to keep this time-tracking culture in the organization. 

Tips for enhancing time-tracking practices within your company

If a company starts time tracking from the beginning, it is more accessible to onboard every following individual. However, if your organization requires people to log their time in Jira, you will face a lot of protests and different issues.

This article includes some advice based on the experience in SaaSJet and people's reflections on previous jobs. 

1. ✅Define the purpose and be honest. 

If your responsibility is to start the time-tracking process, then write down the real reason for it. Talk to management and clarify it. The main thing here is to have a clearly defined so that you can easily stay at the town hall meeting and give this item like first, second and third without thinking. If the reasons are clear enough and people will feel it runs the company to success, then it is a good step forward.

 2. ✅Please select the right tool and test it properly.

Even if people support you, tech issues can break everything. If the tool is wrong, people will complain, make jogs and finally, this story become a nightmare. We recommend organizing the org team and testing as many tools as possible. Involve people to try it for some time, like an actual workflow, and ask for feedback. Then once you select two-three tools, talk to app vendors. It is essential to know if the tool has a support team behind it and how they deal with security. Where these guys save your data and how nice they are. You will likely talk to them anyway, so you should feel confident that people there care about their customers. 

3. ✅Once the process starts, consider the bonuses when people do everything correctly.

Show others then particular people did everything properly, and you can get the correct data, calculate the team cost, get the accurate finance info and finally achieve what is essential. So, show others that it's important and it's easy.

4. ✅Ensure people log time regularly.

If people didn't log time for recent two days, most likely they will log it wrong since they don't remember what they were working on recently. 

We recommend running regular checklists assigning issues to every person to confirm the time has been logged. We recommend the Business Process Manager app. You can set a regular task creation, which is one more item to ensure people log time.

5. ✅Give people access to the data.

Make a presentation about how other managers can use the time log data.

We recommend our product Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud add-on to generate the EVM report, service company data for invoices, scope cost, JSM issues cost etc. 

There is no magic, but those five items can help you to organize everything properly. 

Again, your success is the symbiosis of organization and tech excellence. Good preparation and the right tools will run your company to success.