Can You Actually Tell Time?

Frequently, Teams Get Ahead of Their Skis When Talking Hours

A common occurrence in the Workfront configuration world is a conflicting request between the preparedness and will of a team adopting Workfront and their management team's desire to generate return on investment (ROI) from a Workfront integration. This post is part management theory and part Workfront best practice. I hope to help teams avoid a major point of friction as they being their Workfront journey, or attempt to rekindle the tool as part of an overhaul.

What Data Can You Actually (Accurately) Gather?

Here, and anywhere the subject comes up, I'll argue feverishly that teams do not have time in this digital work environment to use an old school "start/stop" time tracking method. Work is too fast moving and fluid to accurately break each of your hours into the items you affected. If a manager truly wants to see what their employee did each hour, they'll end up with an absolute mess of a table with likely no less than twenty entries per hour. Managers can expect to see data on items either studied, referenced, created, reviewed, updated, etc. The end result will be a mishmash of the last three quarters of five to ten minute chunks of data than a trained accountant can likely decipher per employee by the fourth quarter each year. Assuming employees also took the significant time required to hit start/stop on every single item they jumped to during the day.

Lay the Groundwork With Templates

Templates create structure without necessarily creating rigidity. The starting point for teams that are attempting to understand their time requirements for work is the Duration column in Workfront. Think of the duration of the project as a first draft of the actual time requirements for your work process. Without noted durations for the first quarter in Workfront your team will have to rely on actual data as the initial watermark, which will put the analysis process an entire quarter behind while the team waits for quarter two to complete.

At this time, you can begin to insert planned hours into the templates as well, but do not initially require users (especially if your team is wholly new to Workfront) to track hours spent as well. The best result you'll get is a "finger in the wind" guess as to how much time they are spending.

Once you complete the initial review of templates you are checking for time accuracy, reset the durations to their new expected timeline using a version two template. Workfront saves which template was used when creating a project so your team will have the additional benefit of an apples to oranges template comparison related to actual vs. planned time logged in the system.

Adding in planned hours sounds like an obvious next step, but the tracking requirements, and the muscle memory needed to get accurate numbers from entire teams is significant. After the team is comfortable with their duration accuracy, enablement centered around the efforts to track hours is required to ensure the process doesn't become a distraction to the actual work being tracked. Some potential best practices to tracking hours for new teams is a 15 minute end-of-day personal meeting with the explicitly stated goal of accurate accounting of the user's day. Another option is a manager report that pulls completed tasks that do not have any actual hours logged. Managers and task assignees alike can use this report to complete a "clean up" of their time tracking. Keep in mind the accuracy of accounting for time dwindles as time from the event passes, so the cadence on this process should be no less than weekly.

Reiterate Until The Template Is Accurate, Then Refine

Teams need to retain the process of estimating and then measuring their durations and planned hours for multiple cycles until the team can "trust" the output. Once there is a satisfactory accuracy to the planned process, then and only then should teams begin to try and refine and lean up the overall process to increase productivity. If this process is rushed managers and users can expect haphazard guesses at best, and missed deadlines and deliverables at worst. Take your time, and continue to measure as you iterate on your assumptions. At the end of this process you'll have a rich data set specific to your company function that can be used both for continued current improvement, and more intelligent planning in the future.

Contact Us

Ready to transform your Workfront experience? Email info@smart-forge.net to schedule a consultation with John Mitchell, owner of SmartForge, and take the first step toward a smarter system.

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