Management of resources is a high priority on people’s list. Organizations have a lot of focus on financial resources. Financial resources are usually easy to report on because they are captured in detail in financial systems. However, time is an equally if not more important resource for organizations. Time measurement is a leading indicator of financial results. If you see that people’s time is being spent in non-productive areas you will know that poor financial results will follow. There are many resources for personal time management including blogs such as CEO Blog - Time Leadership. But how do you manage time for an organization?
According to Gord Schmidt, who has implemented time tracking for many Agora customers, key things to keep in mind for end user adoption are:
- Remember the end-user experience – keep the number of time buckets manageable and relatively small
- Cover the spectrum – if you are collecting data to cover all business hours of the day, make sure there are categories that cover non-project work. Divide those categories into work (example: training) and non-work (example: sick time)
- If project schedules will be used to create tasks on the timesheets, train project managers on how to build schedules that make it easier for people to enter timesheets including:
- Distinctly and succinctly named tasks
- Estimated work and duration of tasks needs to be not too long and not too short
- Tasks should be scheduled (or rescheduled to) when they will realistically be done
- Senior executives need to own the implementation which means they should:
- Actively talk about the benefits
- Follow up to ensure compliance
- Define the process for resources entering time and managers approving time and ensure to handle the common exceptions (people away, fixing mistakes, etc.)
- Hands-on training for the users
Finally, understand what the key objectives are for your people. Report on time by mapping them to those objectives. As well, ensure a feedback mechanism is in place for the employee. Can they see what they spend their time on last week vs. their peers? Can you see a trend over time? Can they see actual time allocations vs where they are expected to spend their time?
By putting the same effort into time management as organizations do for financial management people’s behaviours will be focused on what’s important and corrective actions can be taken sooner.