Anybody who ever filled in time sheets knows what a pain it can be. Worse, any ticket based time tracking implies that you should be doing productive work at all times. We all know that's not true... Here's what's wrong with the classical time sheets approach:
- It requires you to interrupt your activities
- Since it's not integrated in all aspects of your workflow you often forget about them
- It's a lot of extra work to provide context to the time submission
- Tracking only happens for “billable” items
So with any classic time tracking system you end up with some or all of the below:
- Gaps in your time sheets
- Lots of stress and unhappy people
- Time sheets that don't have much to do with what actually happened
At Pronovix we decided we had enough of old-school time sheets and that we needed another solution. That's when we stumbled upon Bubbletimer a really cool productivity tool for human friendly time sheets. At 20$/year it's really not expensive, so if you don't need integration with your custom built platform, you might as well use the service.
However, what we wanted was to be able to integrate time tracking with a Drupal based project management system. So we wanted to link the activities we track to their representation (e.g. organic group, issue, node) and be able to aggregate it easily for the different colleagues. So we decided to develop a time tracker for Drupal based on the basic concepts from Bubbletimer. This was just the right job for Peter, our new colleague who joined the company in February. Two weeks later he did a terrific job on his first encounter with the Drupal API. Once we've got CSV exports, he'll be releasing a working beta version to the Drupal community.
We figured that for customers it only matters that you can assign a certain length of time to a certain (sub)project. Therefore it is acceptable to actively only track until a (sub)project level and not ticket level. The advantage of this is that you can track all activities - also learning, marketing (e.g. blogging, Twitter), sales, community contribution – without having to work with a complex interface. In the classic approach people will normally not report on these knowledge/business building activities.
We started implementing this approach at our company with the intrinsic agreement that it's ok to spend time reading your RSS reader, even if you spent some few minutes laughing about crazy cat pictures. But these activities should also get into your time tracker (e.g. learning/break). This system is also a great immediate feedback tool: the graphical report under the time tracker helps the user realize when the work related stuff is going too far off the radar. The user him/herself becomes so aware of unhealthy situations. What's next? We are now researching how we can integrate the Bubbletimer module with an activities timeline from either activities or heartbeat. This would make it even easier to fill in your time sheets.
Retrospectively and without any additional pain on the user side, this could be used to generate a trail that can be included in the time sheet report to provide justification for the time spent.
Peter will be putting out a demo somewhere this week, so stay tuned!
