TEAM TIME-TRACKING: WHAT KIND OF BEAST

On the eve of the magic of winter holidays, we recall the film "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". But there is a much more insidious thief who steals not only gifts and good spirit, but also productivity. It is about team time management.

MOMENT STOP

You work hours long but have a lack of time; you are always busy but not productive; you get tired quickly and are often distracted - these symptoms are familiar to both office workers and freelancers. Time is a valuable and irreplaceable resource, so the first time-tracker programs were created to track your time spent in order to control it and use rationally.

In the past, some tools were required for time tracking - a clock, a plan, a paper sheet or an Excel spreadsheet. Now, one service is enough. There are thousands of products for time tracking on the market. But what can a work team, a department or a whole company choose?

SEARCHING FOR THE PERFECT TEAM TIME TRACKER

What difficulties do employees face every day during teamwork?

Uneven productivity. The last-minute performed task is the same as the performed all week long task;
Wrong calculation. Without a time-tracker, the team counts the time spent on the task as a whole working day by default. Customers do not trust the "manual" calculation;
Unpredictability. Using of Scrum or other work concepts will be ineffective without a time tracker. For example, without time-tracking it is difficult to do the mandatory Scrum daily meetings that can affect the work process.

Analysing these three problems, the concept of an ideal team time tracker is appeared. Our time-tracker...:

keeps a record of the tasks completed and hours spent on them;
counts income - useful for hourly payment that is popular in the fields of IT, marketing and advertising;
creates reports on different parameters - the correct time tracker will calculate how much time is spent per month on work, separate these data into projects, customers and executors;
is useful for each team member - time calculating is useful not only to determine the amount of salary, but also to analyze the productivity and improve time management skills;
it supports all the popular operating systems - an IT specialist can work on Linux, a sales managers - on Windows, and a designer - on MacOS;
provides additional information for a manager about the employees.

All these is packaged in the application with an intuitive interface that won't slow down your computer.

These were the criteria we used to create our online time tracker Checkiant, adding as well: