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It is a massive drain on morale. Billable hours sure, but tracking non-billable hours is just making management's job my job. I the impact it has is regularly u

by ehnto 4y ago

It is a massive drain on morale. Billable hours sure, but tracking non-billable hours is just making management's job my job. I the impact it has is regularly underestimated.

gnat 4y ago
Very hard to know if you've missed logging some billable time if your work day isn't in the time tracking system. We hemorrhaged billable hours when I said ppl didn't have to log non-billable time. You'd end up with a 2.5h block and it was unclear if that was 2.5h of internal meetings and email and whatnot, or 1h of forgot-to-time billable and 1.5h of genuinely unbillable. It's a pain in the ass but people are fallible and this catches those falls.
- ehnto 4y ago
  Admittedly I've lived exactly what you're saying, I do get it. But I'd love to explore less impactful alternatives. It depends a lot on the companies attitude towards it, and how it's implemented too. If the process of tracking time is too complicated, with too many layers of management wrapped up in the tracking process, you have a brand new overhead, and it's saddled with stress and miscommunication. Tracking non-billable hours can at least be done in a reasonable way, and maybe you're doing that . You can see the difference between asking someone to track "Meetings" as a line item, and asking them to track "Meetings for client X to job number 22324, wait no, that was last months, the new job number is 22342, and it's not billable this month, but next month it's billable again, I'm not the PM for next month so you'll have to chase up the job number with the new PM..."
wiredfool 4y ago
I want to know unbillable time, because coordination overhead and other crap can grow and eat into productive time. We put in sprints and standups (in a small co, With 2n projects) at one point, and tracking made us realize that this ceremony was costing us 15% of our time and maybe giving us 1% utility.
- ehnto 4y ago
  I hope I'm not being too short, but why did it take atomic tracking from all your employees to figure that out? You should have known that when you implemented sprints and standups. I guess that's what I mean by making it my job. It shouldn't be too difficult in small companies to keep track of how much impact unbillable process has. Attend a standup, how long did it take? Probably takes about that long every time, do some quick math. Ask your developers, do they feel it's worthwhile? No? Scrap it, make it shorter. I can appreciate the impact of unbillable hours on the bottom line, and the impact of uncaught billable hours as well. But surely a PM can manage that without having to track every minute of the day? Set a guideline for billable hours per week, try to enable people to meet it. Be supportive rather than punitive.
  - wiredfool 4y ago
    At the time, I was a worker bee. Small dev staff (2 or 3, with 5-10 projects, so 1 person per project), Small company. CEO/Founder was the boss, and direct manager of everyone. I was 3/5 time, and only 2 days a week in the office, with others in and out of the office as well. So we do this thing, and the dev team impression is that it's taking a lot of time, but it was good because it was a way for micromanaging in bulk. But then we turn around and add up the time and it was a concrete way to say "This is taking too much time" without coming out and saying: "This is crap".
    - ehnto 4y ago
      Fair enough, as always real life is more nuanced than internet discussions. I know we do the things we do for good reasons, and with the best information we can get.

by ehnto 4y ago

It is a massive drain on morale. Billable hours sure, but tracking non-billable hours is just making management's job my job. I the impact it has is regularly underestimated.

gnat 4y ago

Very hard to know if you've missed logging some billable time if your work day isn't in the time tracking system. We hemorrhaged billable hours when I said ppl didn't have to log non-billable time. You'd end up with a 2.5h block and it was unclear if that was 2.5h of internal meetings and email and whatnot, or 1h of forgot-to-time billable and 1.5h of genuinely unbillable. It's a pain in the ass but people are fallible and this catches those falls.

ehnto 4y ago
Admittedly I've lived exactly what you're saying, I do get it. But I'd love to explore less impactful alternatives. It depends a lot on the companies attitude towards it, and how it's implemented too. If the process of tracking time is too complicated, with too many layers of management wrapped up in the tracking process, you have a brand new overhead, and it's saddled with stress and miscommunication. Tracking non-billable hours can at least be done in a reasonable way, and maybe you're doing that . You can see the difference between asking someone to track "Meetings" as a line item, and asking them to track "Meetings for client X to job number 22324, wait no, that was last months, the new job number is 22342, and it's not billable this month, but next month it's billable again, I'm not the PM for next month so you'll have to chase up the job number with the new PM..."

wiredfool 4y ago

I want to know unbillable time, because coordination overhead and other crap can grow and eat into productive time. We put in sprints and standups (in a small co, With 2n projects) at one point, and tracking made us realize that this ceremony was costing us 15% of our time and maybe giving us 1% utility.

ehnto 4y ago
I hope I'm not being too short, but why did it take atomic tracking from all your employees to figure that out? You should have known that when you implemented sprints and standups. I guess that's what I mean by making it my job. It shouldn't be too difficult in small companies to keep track of how much impact unbillable process has. Attend a standup, how long did it take? Probably takes about that long every time, do some quick math. Ask your developers, do they feel it's worthwhile? No? Scrap it, make it shorter. I can appreciate the impact of unbillable hours on the bottom line, and the impact of uncaught billable hours as well. But surely a PM can manage that without having to track every minute of the day? Set a guideline for billable hours per week, try to enable people to meet it. Be supportive rather than punitive.
- wiredfool 4y ago
  At the time, I was a worker bee. Small dev staff (2 or 3, with 5-10 projects, so 1 person per project), Small company. CEO/Founder was the boss, and direct manager of everyone. I was 3/5 time, and only 2 days a week in the office, with others in and out of the office as well. So we do this thing, and the dev team impression is that it's taking a lot of time, but it was good because it was a way for micromanaging in bulk. But then we turn around and add up the time and it was a concrete way to say "This is taking too much time" without coming out and saying: "This is crap".
  - ehnto 4y ago
    Fair enough, as always real life is more nuanced than internet discussions. I know we do the things we do for good reasons, and with the best information we can get.