The importance of time tracking in bigger teams

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According to Atlassian, 60% or less of work time is spent productively. Work time could be spent more wisely if managers and their teams had a proper overview of the time distribution so they could optimize their operations.

In smaller teams, it’s usually easier to manage time effectively. Communication is faster and more direct. The capacity of those teams is limited, so tasks need to be selected wisely and individual contributors usually know perfectly well what they need to focus on.

Bigger teams tend to face the following challenges:

• More complex processes involving more people

• Lack of transparency on who’s working on what, and how time-consuming those tasks are

• Overload of internal communications and meetings leads to distractions and forgetting about the higher goals
  
  

The lack of visibility where time is lost affects companies' daily operations.
Poor operations can lead to reduced productivity on both an individual and company-wide level. Time wasted on unnecessary tasks and processes can reduce company profits by slowing down revenue streams and creating bare-minimum work. 

Managers can counter this and promote operation excellence if they have the right data. Here is where time tracking is coming to the rescue!

Time tracking can help you to identify what challenges your team is facing:

• Too complex or manual processes

• Unnecessary work that is done just because of reliance on the status quo

• Unfavorable proportion of billable time vs total available time of the team

• Understaffing and the need to increase capacity

• Wrong distribution or lack of tasks delegation within the team

• Overworked team members

• Ineffective or lengthy meetings 
  
  

Solving those problems can not only improve the profitability of the business and stop the revenue loss, but it can also help to improve employee morale and create a positive and transparent employee environment.

Key benefits of time tracking for bigger teams:

• The whole organization stays in the loop with what’s happening

• Increased visibility makes it easy to identify capacity crunches

• The team can take responsibility for their use of time

• Improved tracking of operational and billable hours helps in accurate billing and payroll
  
  

Now that you know how time tracking can help your operational excellence, let’s have a look at how to track time easily and accurately. Picking out the perfect time-tracking app depends on not only understanding the needs of you and your team but also in-depth knowledge of the different tools in the marketplace, from their features to their differences.

Clockwork Automated Time Tracking & Timesheets Pro for Jira, the app developed by my team at HeroCoders, can help you in providing flexible and dynamic timesheet reports in which you can:

• Filter and break down the data by various elements such as Epics, Issue Types, Labels, Custom Fields and Worklog Attributes, etc.

• Identify missing worklogs by using outliers filters and highlight the daily summaries where the team’s time was less than their expected working hours

• Review your billable entries to keep track of your billing data

• Analyze what type of activities the team is spending most of their time on

• Summarize your project’s used hours

• Track the progress of your epics, stories, issues, etc. by comparing estimates and actuals

• Save versions of your report to regularly review and analyze the data with your teams for operational excellence