Which approach to tracking time is best for your engineering team?

How hard could it be, right? Let your team know that you want them to start tracking their time, collect the data at the end of the month, tabulate the time and costs from everyone’s time entries - and you’re all set. 

Then reality brings that dream crashing down…

If you’ve tried to roll out a time-tracking solution to your team, then you know that getting a group of people to do anything is challenging, let alone something as personal and involved as tracking time. 

In this blog post, I’m going to delve into the most common time-tracking solutions available on the market. By understanding these different approaches, you can be better equipped to navigate the complexities of introducing time tracking in your team and increase the chances of a successful rollout with a tool that works best for you. 

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Caveat emptor: be more focused on your people than the tool

In a recent blog post, I wrote about the importance of the “Why” when rolling out a time-tracking solution to your team, rather than getting distracted by tools. While the tooling behind the initiative will certainly be challenging, you can be fairly confident that you will eventually find a technical solution that will work for you in practice. But if your people are against it, you’ll end up with the deck stacked against you, especially if it triggers a political response within your organization. A better approach is to get alignment behind the “why” first, then get consensus on the best way to solve the problem, ensuring that everyone has had an opportunity to voice concerns (which you should do your best to respect, or at least address, at every step of the rollout). For example, as I elaborate on in this past blog post, if capital efficiency is the goal, simply explaining why accruing time to capital initiatives is so expensive can go a long way toward getting your team to see the value in the time-tracking exercise. 

Once you’ve got consensus, moving lock-step in phases, with frequent level-setting meetings with your team to ensure that you’re on track (and which next steps make the most sense) is a wise move. This allows you to course correct in real-time, rather than finding yourself off track and not quite knowing where things went wrong. 

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An off-the-shelf tool won’t be a silver bullet

You have many options for recording your team’s time, and each tool on the market has a variety of pros and cons. Let’s sum up the most common options:

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Time-tracking add-ons to your existing project management or ticketing system

This is a tempting solution to the problem. Your team is already using the ticketing system, so why not use it to track time? 

That’s certainly a plus, but let’s examine a few of the cons:

• Time entry is often a pain, and so it’s always left for “later”. But when finally later comes (often the day before management demands that everyone get their time entered), it’s hard to remember how much time was spent on the myriad tasks that a given team member worked on over the course of a month.
  
  
• What about tasks for which there is no “ticket” in the system? Think meetings, QA, project management, etc… And this time is not one-size-fits-all. Some meetings can be considered capitalizable, and some can’t, for example. If you want your team to track all their time, you need to give them a framework within which to track all their time - and allow that time to be easily queried and aggregated in a structured manner in the future.
  
  
• Having your time entries in an external tool and database which you may not have direct access to can be very problematic. If the tool has an API that you can query to pull the data, that requires custom development - which can break when the API is changed by the vendor, leaving you with a potential emergency on your hand when you can’t generate the report you need. And this is assuming you can even get the data you need from the API, which may or may not be possible. Further, because you don’t control the feature set on the tool, you can’t enforce requirements, such as a freeze on editing time entries from a past month or quarter once a summary has been sent to key stakeholders, such as Finance. With something so important, it’s risky to have no control over such an important data source.
  
  
• Further, you’re subject to the security and data warehousing practices of an external vendor, over whom you have no control. If they are hacked, or experience a data loss event, you have very little recourse. 

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A dedicated time-tracking or ERP solution:

There are many dedicated time-tracking and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions available on the market. Each of these tools has been developed to appeal to a broad swath of the market, with the features that this demographic needs. 

ERP solutions, while very customizable, are often extremely expensive, comprehensive and time-consuming to roll out, requiring your organization to change much more than just one element of its workflow to use the tool (if not simply to get your money’s worth). 

On the other hand, lighter and less expensive dedicated time-tracking solutions are often much less expensive, and much more focused on simple time tracking (with maybe a lightweight project management element bolted on). But this simplicity and focus on a more targeted demographic of SMBs and freelancers means that many of the features of the product might not make sense for an enterprise organization. 

Even if the need might be for a relatively small tweak to the service’s feature set, this can sometimes be impossible to actualize. You simply can’t control another company’s roadmap, and certainly not to the scale that you’d need to make a tool truly work for you and your team. 

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Build your own custom solution

You could, of course, always build your own solution. If you have the engineering talent, then this is theoretically possible. But where will the vision for the product come from? Do you have a product owner on your team with a vision for what the tool can and should become? Would you need to hire for this role? Taking on an effort like this can become a major and costly effort, and while perhaps an option, it’s maybe not the biggest priority on your list. 

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A base toolkit with a methodology baked in

Given the limitations of the above approaches, CapEx Copilot has carved out a different path for enterprise organizations looking to track time. 

The platform itself is fully extensible and customizable, can be hosted internally, and comes with a perspective on how it can be best implemented within your organization, based on your unique circumstances, needs, and team. 

The platform features an API that allows your team to build custom tools that integrate with it — and further, build integrations into your own internal applications where time tracking might be needed. 

Each engagement comes with a time-tracking specialist who can help advise on how to roll out the platform to your team, including the features, reporting, and dashboards that should be enabled or developed custom for you, and how your human processes might be adjusted to make the rollout a success. 

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Which approach is best for you?

Obviously, your situation is unique, and only you can know what approach will be best for your organization. But, if there was one key takeaway is that you need more than a tool to transition to tracking your team’s time. Any tool you choose needs to be a part of a broader system and methodology that will account for:

1. The technical needs of your team and features of the tool
2. The workflow processes that may need to be adjusted for a successful end-to-end process
3. The human dynamic: how will human systems (and the politics that come along with human systems) play into the picture? Your tool should speak to that - as it is perhaps the most decisive aspect of success or failure of a rollout.

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In summary, choosing the right time-tracking approach is a nuanced decision that extends beyond simply picking a tool. It's about finding a solution that harmoniously blends with your team's technical needs, workflow processes, and the human dynamics within your organization. Remember, the success of a time-tracking initiative hinges not just on the software you choose, but also on how it integrates into your team's daily activities and aligns with your organizational culture. Ultimately, the most effective time-tracking system is one that is embraced by your people, adaptable to your specific needs, and capable of evolving with your organization. As you consider your options, weigh them against these broader considerations to ensure seamless integration and sustainable adoption of time-tracking in your workplace.

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