Most companies have their employees fill out traditional time sheets in order to track their time spent on projects. Whilst this approach is really the only option available (up until now), there are some serious shortcomings that affect the accuracy of information captured by manual time sheets:
- remembering what you actually did - most employees don't complete their time sheet on a daily basis. In fact many wait weeks before getting around to filling out their time sheet. Can you really recall what you did on a sub-hourly basis 3 weeks ago ? As a result we end up 'guessing' what we did on a particular day. While this might give us a rough idea of effort spend on various projects, the inaccuracy introduced could severely skew the picture (either way) when we look at a particular project's profitability.
- being honest about effort on each project -
- correct project - employees are pressured to be as productive as possible - which means the should be spending more time on fee paying projects than on admin (or other) tasks. In reality, your workday does consist of non project related time - and the utilization targets set my employers are often unrealistic. However most employees feel the need to capture more time than what they actually did to project work (this is particularly true of larger projects) when this time should really be allocated to overheads.
- under reporting - You've filled in everything you can remember doing last week and you only have 30 hours of time allocated for the week, even though you know you worked crazy hours all week. So you end up simply upping the hours here and there to get to the minimum requirement of 40 hours. This results in the time (and cost) captured against the project you worked crazy hours on being under-reported. At the end of the project your boss thinks it was a fantastic job that was highly profitable - and signs the contract with the same client for his next job (maybe even with a discounted fee) - dooming you to more late nights at the office.
- over reporting - Time sheets are sometimes seen as a means for employers to police employees - i.e. to make sure they aren't doing non work related activities during work time. As such, some employees might feel pressured to 'pad' their time sheet to reflect a more productive picture. This results in more time (and cost) being allocated to projects than what actually happened in reality.
To illustrate the point, a study was done recently at a large Consulting Engineering firm, where the time captured on time sheets was compared to entry and exit records from the office access control system. In some cases, the time sheets were exaggerated (this was particularly demonstrable for office based workers like CAD and admin staff). But the greater inaccuracy was severe under-reporting of time spent at the office (i.e. the access control showed massively longer hours than the time sheets) by technical staff.
Many of the inaccuracies outlined above in traditional time sheets are driven by the fact that (for the majority of employees) it is a complete pain to 'do your time sheets' - which means that the exercise is put off for later... which makes the matter worse as when you finally get round to filling in your time sheet (i.e. your boss has nagged you for the 100th time) you have forgotten what you did on a particular day 3 weeks ago.
A Fresh Approach
Fortunately FRESH PROJECTS has tackled this issue head on. We have developed a brilliant and innovative approach to tracking employee time:
- Smartphone App - our clever app runs quietly on your smartphone and monitors your workday. Firstly it has access to your calendar, so can see what meetings and appointments you attend. Secondly it uses the smartphone's 'significant location change' service to efficiently (ie. without draining your battery) monitor your movements throughout the working day (including travel to and participation in project meetings).
- Desktop App - We have a complementary desktop app that unobtrusively monitors the active window on your PC throughout the working day. It can track how many hours you spend using for example, Outlook, MS Word or AutoCAD. It even can determine which file you were working on - allowing it to establish the likely project from the file or path name.
- Intelligent Computation Engine - Our brilliant computation engine receives input from the smartphone and desktop apps and applies artificial intelligence to pre-populate your daily time sheet. As you confirm your daily time sheet (see below), the engine learns your behavior (e.g. you have a specific project meeting every Tuesday at 3pm) allowing for greater accuracy and less user input.
- Employee Confirmation - We understand that a machine can never be 100% accurate and also that user privacy is important. Therefore no data is stored in the official time sheet without the user confirming the information. This is done on a daily basis either through the smartphone app or through the website. The pre-calculated time sheet is presented to the user for confirmation (or editing) prior to official capture into the costing engine.
Much easier - and much more accurate, don't you think ?
