Just as a throwaway in my post on understanding your team’s progress I said something like “everyone hates timesheets”. And it’s true, they do. They’re onerous, boring and they’re usually seen as invasive, “big brother”-esque, make-work. But, as I also said in that post, good quality time recording is vital to understanding what’s going on within your teams.
Feeling the need
We first started looking at timesheet systems nine or ten years ago when it was becoming abundantly clear that we weren’t making the progress we were expecting on certain projects, but we didn’t know why.
The teams were skilled in the tools they were using, they were diligent, they’d done similar work before, but they just weren’t hitting the velocities that we had come to expect. On top of that, the teams themselves thought they were making good progress. And every which way we approached the problem we were missing the information needed to get to the bottom of the mismatch between expectation and reality.
At that point in the company’s life timesheets were anathema to us; we felt very strongly they indicated a lack of trust, and in a company built entirely on the principles behind the Agile Manifesto… Well… You can see our problem.
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.
But however we cut it we really needed to understand what people were actually doing with their day. We trusted that if people thought they were making good progress then they were, but we definitely knew that we weren’t making the same kind of progress that we had been a year ago on the same types of project. And back then we were often on fixed price projects and billing by the day, so when projects started to overrun our financial performance started to dip and the quality of our code went the same way (for all the reasons I outlined in that previous post).
So we hit on Harvest (at the time one of the poster children of the burgeoning Rails SaaS community) and asked everyone to fill in their sheets for a couple of months so we could generate some data.
We had an all hands meeting, we explained exactly why we were doing it, and we asked, cajoled and bullied people into using it so that at least we had something to work on and perhaps uncover the problems we were hitting.
And of course we found it quickly enough, because accurate timesheets filled in honestly expose exactly what’s going on. By our nature we are both helpful and curious – that’s how we ended up doing what we’re doing. But helpful and curious is easily distracted; a colleague asking for help, an old customer with a quick question, a project manager from another project with an urgent request, the account management team asking “can you just…” And all of this added up. In the worst cases some people were only spending four hours a day on the project they were allocated to; the rest of their time spent helping colleagues and old customers… However, how you cope with these things is probably the subject of another post.
My point here is that once we had that data we realised how valuable it was and knew that we couldn’t go without it again. Our key takeaway was that timesheets are a key part of a company’s introspection and without good data you don’t know the problem you’re actually trying to solve. And so we had to make timesheets part of our everyday processes.
Loving the alien
Like I said; people hate timesheets. They’re invasive. They’re time consuming. They feel like you’re being watched, judged. They imply no trust. They’re alien to an agile environment. And the data they produce is a key part of someone else’s reporting, too. So how do you make sure they’re filled in accurately and honestly? And not just in month one, when you first introduce them, but in month fifty seven when your business relies on them and you may not be watching quite so closely.
We’ve found the following works for us:
- Make it crystal clear what they’re for, and what they’re not
- Make it explicit that timesheets are for tracking the performance of estimates and ensuring that progress can be reported accurately
- It’s not about how much you do, but how much got done
- Tie them together with things like iDoneThis, so that people can give context to their timesheets in an informal unstructured manner
- Make sure that everyone who uses the data throughout the management chain is incentivised to treat it honestly – this means your project managers mustn’t feel the need to manipulate it or worse manipulate how it’s entered (we’ve seen this more than once in other organisations)
And Sarah, one of our project managers, sends round a gentle chivvying email each evening (filled with the day’s fun facts, of course) to make sure that people actually fill them in.
