How Agile Time Tracking Can Benefit Your Remote Team
If you are managing a team that mainly works remotely and you would like to empower your team, make team members happy and at the same time be more productive you need to implement Agile Time Tracking.
Agile Time Tracking is a form of time tracking which team members do themselves and which is integrated into an agile way of working. In Agile Time Tracking team members are asked to put a time estimate to each of their daily tasks and then to self track the time spent on completion of the tasks.
Below we will explain the reason to use Agile Time Tracking and how best to do it.
1. Developments Making Agile Time Tracking a Necessity
There have been two major developments over the last few years that have increased the importance of Agile Time Tracking.
First, remote work has increased. Many employees are no longer required to spend the majority of their work time in the office. This trend was propelled further by the Coronavirus pandemic forcing many companies to close down their main office and let employees work from home.
Second, agile ways of working are becoming more and more popular. While there are many different concepts of agility (for a detailed definition of agility look at:
“A New Definition of Agility”
The fundamental principles of agility are:
● Working with an empowered team
● Complete transparency
● Working in cycles with a planning at the beginning and a review at the end of the cycle
The empowerment of the team stands in contrast with tracking the time each employee. However, as employees are no longer coming to the office and get the flexibility to choose work time and work location, the employers want to know the work time of the employees.
When you are managing a team that comes to the office you do not need any time tracking, you just look at how much time is spent at the office. And in fact you do not have to do it yourself; the whole team will notice if one team member is constantly absent. However, if you are managing a remote team there is no way to easily check working hours in such an implicit way. So remote working requires some time tracking.
So that, you basically have three options:
- You track the work time of your team members yourself with a time tracking software
- You do not track time at all
- You let the employees track their own time
Which of these options is the best?
1.1. You track the work time of your team members yourself with a time tracking software
The first option, of tracking the work time of your team members, means that a software monitors what they are doing on their computer and computes the work time. This option has the advantage that you get the most reliable time measure, and makes it hard for your team to cheat by overstating their work time.
However, many team members will not like such external monitoring and might in fact refuse working in such a controlled environment. Also, this does not show your trust into your team and thus can impair team empowerment, which is an important part of agile teams.
Therefore, using time tracking software to track your team is generally not a good option.
1.2. Not tracking work time at all
This has the advantage that you show you trust your team. However, team members that do not come to the office might very well work less time than their contractual obligation. In many cases this is not due to their bad will but rather happens as their personal life mixes into their work life.
Also, without time tracking it might actually be difficult for your team to know exactly how much time they spent working, as they often will frequently switch between personal and work tasks.
Although it is true that only the final result matters, in many cases the result is intangible and therefore difficult to measure. Also, in many teams the result depends on the effort of the whole team, so there is no clear association between anybody’s individual work and the final work result.
Therefore, not tracking work time at all is also not a good option.
1.3. You let the employees track their own time
A third option is to let employees track their own time. This option combines the advantages of both of the other options and is thus the best option for most remote teams. Unfortunately, few teams are aware of this option. Therefore, we will explain the pros and cons of it and explain the way that it should be implemented, what we call Agile Time Tracking.
2. Potential Disadvantages of Self Time Tracking
When people oppose self time tracking they generally come up with two arguments:
● Time measurement is a waste of time
● Team members not happy as they feel not trusted
2.1. Time measurement is a waste of time
Some people state that measuring time is a waste of time. This would only be true in case there was little benefit and the time needed was significant. Neither of those is the case.
First, time estimates and time tracking should take only a few minutes a day, as the time estimates can be rough and writing down the actual time should only take a few seconds per task. Also, as we will see below, the time estimates and time measurement is integrated in the agile working of the team using the scrum methodology. So time estimates are already necessary for the creation of the sprint backlog and daily tasks lists.
Secondly, the time measurement has many benefits that we will show below that far outweigh the little time invested in time measurement.
2.2. Team members not happy as they feel not trusted
Some people state that any form of time tracking goes against team empowerment as it shows that the management does not fully trust the team.
In fact, the opposite is true. Team members that I have worked with always appreciate the fact that they get to choose their work location, their total work hours, their work schedule and that they do not have to use an external tracking software. I only ask them to write down themselves the time that they have worked. This is a sign of trust.
Also, team members will often tell me that they like the fact that by writing down time they get more conscious of what they are working on. So they would continue doing it even if not required.
In the past I did have members of my team that did not appreciate time tracking and were not able to do it. They would constantly forget to write down their tasks and then complain in case we would only compensate for tasks for which the time was measured. However, the team members that complaint also were the most disorganized and the least productive, so in fact it was a good thing for them to leave the team. The self time tracking worked like a filter: if the team member was too disorganized he would get problems and thus leave the team, which was great for the team.
On other hand those people that are from the start self disciplined enough to constantly use the time tracking system are happy to use it, will stay with the company, and are adding to the productivity.
In summary, there are no real disadvantages to self time tracking.
3. Advantages of Self Time Tracking
There are many advantages to self time tracking.
3.1. Flexible Location and flexible time
WIth self time tracking team members get paid only for the hours of work that they actually contributed and wrote into the time tracking system. That gives us the confidence to allow people to work from anywhere. In case they were getting a monthly salary independent of the work hours, and they would never come to the office, we as the team management, would soon worry if we did not see any work results. However, by having them tracking their hours for each task and us being able to follow every ptask they have worked on and how much time it took we are able to give our team the freedom to work from anywhere without closely monitoring them.
Also, we can let them choose when to work and how many hours to work. We only required the team to attend 2 team meetings a week and to respond to requests within 24 hours. They also can determine the total amount of work. If for example they want to work a little less to go sightseeing in a new country they are welcome to do so, but of course they will only get paid for the work hours that they have self tracked.
3.3. Keep barrier between personal life and work
Writing down work hours has another benefit for our team members, it keeps a barrier between personal and work life. Especially for remote workers working from home, the personal and work life are mixed up; at one moment they are writing an email to a client, at the next they have to take care of their child. This causes them to be not only less focused in their work, but also have their work on their mind during their personal life. It is better for the productivity at work as well as the happiness during their personal/family time to have a work — personal separation.
This can be achieved by working with a time tracker. As soon as you start work, you have to activate the time tracker or at least check the time. This acts as a way to signal to your brain that now you are in work mode. Similarly, as soon as you get from work mode to personal life mode, you have to deactivate the time tracker or at least check the time, which again helps you switch off work mode.
3.4. Trust relationship
As already explained above, self time tracking does not lead to mistrust and is not a symbol of mistrust but is a symbol of trust between the team and the management.
For even bigger trust, and team empowerment, it helps if everyone on the team, even the team management tracks their own time and if everyone, including the management, makes their work time transparent to everyone else.
3.5. Time analytics
A nice side benefit of the whole team writing down the work hours is that you can generate interesting analytics. For example, you can generate a burn down chart that visualizes the amount of work of the team as a whole as well as of each individual team member. With that chart, as you also see the remaining work, you can instantly see if you are likely going to achieve the sprint objective,
Also, you can see the difference between estimated time and actual time. This ratio of estimate to actual is called the fudge ratio. Although fudge ratios will vary widely, over time you will see an accurate fudge ratio for the team and for each team member. That can be the basis of adjusting the estimation or of having serious discussion with individual team members in case they are continuously delayed in their work.
In summary, self time tracking has many benefits and will lead to more productivity and more happiness at work.
4. Agile Time Tracking: The Best Way to Self Track Time
As we have seen above self time tracking is in agreement with the team empowerment that is core to an agile organization.
But beyond this, we have integrated self time tracking into our agile way of working in focus cycles, that is very similar to Scrum. The way that we do time tracking in our team we thus call Agile Time Tracking.
Agile Time tracking is our method to do time tracking integrated with the agile methodology, and this has worked for us for many years. As a result we have full transparency, productivity, and the team getting a sense of fairness and empowerment.
These are the steps of Agile Time Tracking:
● Split the project and big tasks into smaller tasks
● Estime those tasks in hours. When estimating, you assume a standard developer, in the same way that when estimating in story points, you assume a standard developer.
● Put a reasonable amount of tasks and work time into the sprint
● Assign tasks to team members.
● Let team members responsible for tasks to break these tasks down into even smaller actionable tasks and allow estimating each subtask.
● Let team members adjust the time estimates.
● Make a daily task list
● During the day only work on the tasks in the task list, and every time when you finish a task mark the time it took to complete and adjust the time estimate to the real time.
● These changes and work progress are automatically recorded in the time analytics, in particular in the burn down chart.
● Every team can see the overall team velocity as well as the work of each team member
● In the sprint review meeting review the work results but also check the total work time for each team member.
The above process of Agile Time Tracking will help your organization to become more productive and for your team to enjoy work more.
5. Agile Time Tracking Software
There are plenty of software tools for project management as well as for time tracking. However, there are only a few tools for self time tracking, and for sharing this time with the whole team. ALso, there is no system that allows for an easy way to do the Agile Time Tracking process as described above, including these steps:
- Split the project and big tasks into smaller tasks.
- Estime those tasks in hours.
- Assign tasks to team members.
- Make a daily task list.
- Record automatically the time analytics.
Also, there is no tool that uses the data generated by the self time tracking of the team to create visual reports on team productivity, team delay, team effectiveness etc.
Since there was no good software tool available, we developed a proprietary tool to work perfectly with the above process of Agile Time Tracking. This tool is called Workiamo. As you are reading this article, we let you access it for lifetime for free! In order to do so, you have to register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK
