Anybody else have to do this in work?

lenovoguy

Hi there

I work for a small software company, owned by a much larger multinational company, and we learned today that from tomorrow, the software developers will have to produce end-of-day reports to account for their time, with a view to keeping our sister companies up to date on what we're doing. It seems like a tremendous waste of time and to me it's evidence of a distrust of the dev team on the part of management. Does anybody else working as a developer have to do this?

Giblet

I would put "4pm-5pm, remembering all I did previously to write a report"

Do you have any sort of bug / change tracking software with work logs?

Earthhorse

How much detail do you have to go into?

I work for a large multi-national, everyone has to record their time, even developers, whose time isn't visible. I tend to record it in 7 hour blocks e.g.

Monday - Worked on Conversion Tool
Tuesday - Worked on Archiving System

etc.

yenoah

lenovoguy wrote: »

Hi there

I work for a small software company, owned by a much larger multinational company, and we learned today that from tomorrow, the software developers will have to produce end-of-day reports to account for their time, with a view to keeping our sister companies up to date on what we're doing. It seems like a tremendous waste of time and to me it's evidence of a distrust of the dev team on the part of management. Does anybody else working as a developer have to do this?

I'd be inclined to organise a meeting between your team and your manager to discuss this. It may be that there are reasonable reasons for the requirement and it may be temporary, or it may be that your company as a subsidiary is having to justify itself. Either way you as professionals in its employee need to know. There's a good market out there at the moment for developers so don't feel disenfranchised. You have options but thread reasonably.

ocallagh

I used to have to keep timesheets - PITA but I think it's fair enough, they are paying you after all. I can see a lot of benefits too for your manager aside from just monitoring if you're dossing or not.

btw - I tried a few programs/excel sheets etc but always gave up on them as they were way too complicated and hate having them running in the background... The best solution I came up with was to keep a notepad beside the comp and just scribble a line or two every few hours, or when you attend a meeting/take a call stick down the exact times. At the end of the week it takes 10 mins to write up the list into an excel sheet and it's easy enough to fill the hours then.

fenris

You youngster probably don't remember the early attempts to "manage" developers - try being measured by Lines Of Code! The clean up after that was something to behold, think of the impact of a 330 line percentage calculation on your average payroll run.

Every company that survives past startup eventually tries to "metric" everything and you start hearing phrases like "process driven" quite a lot. Everything will eventually be measured, targets set and performance measured against said targets.

Then trick with any kind of metric like that is to understand what they are trying to measure and play ball EARLY. Otherwise you will end up in serious PHB territory with absolutely no control over your time which is now accounted for in 15 minute seqments. If you can, decide on a meaningful enough reporting format and stick to it, 4 hour blocks are good and easily managable while allowing you to show what is being worked on and flag extra hours. This is your ammo when it is time to look for extra resource/ bonuses etc.

Also make sure that your performance measurements takes the metrics into account, take the award of bonuses into a measurable arena rather that something that is discretionary. If you are being told that you should have reached on something that you didn't have time for, you can now show how the time was spent and bring the discussion to a point where you can state that your time was prioritised for project A Versus Project B and that this was reported daily in your timesheets, giving plenty of scope for a rebalancing of focus etc.

Bottom line, if you work you are measured and assessed, take the opportunity to control that process before the mechanism is imposed. Reporting works both ways and is not just a means to destroy your soul.

stevenmu

It's a pretty standard thing tbh, especially in larger organisations. It's not really about not trusting developers, it's about giving management better information to manage by, or MI for short.

In theory it should enable management to make better strategic decisions, for e.g. if developers who should be working on new features spend 90% of their time bugfixing older version then maybe they need to hire dedicated staff for that, if they only spend 2% of their time doing it then maybe not. Or if something is taking longer than expected there's records they can look at to identify where there were issues and try to rectify them.

kayos

Its nothing but an empirical process baby....

If your company adopted agile then they would be getting this any way in the form of burn down charts.

komodosp

I used to be in the same situation, working in a small "branch" of a larger company, and having to keep timesheets like that. I think it was because they were charging the larger company by the person hour and had to itemise it.
But for some reason we had to do it twice - one for the time we spent on each project, and one for just the time we worked all together. And even though we had flexi time, we had to make it add up to 39 hours each week.

And then our office was bought by another company so they needed the info as well so they gave us another one. And then they decided they wanted CMMI level 5, so they gave us yet another one. So at one stage we were filling the same information into 4 different time sheets each week, all incapable of talking to each other.

srsly78

Nope I don't have to do this. But as a contractor I do have to make up an invoice every month with my days worked, this gets mailed to customer. Usually get paid 3-6 months later :rolleyes:

amen

If your company adopted agile then they would be getting this any way in the form of burn down charts.

not necessarily. I could be down for a task that based on prior agile takes on average 4 hours but maybe I'm dossing and I spend 3 hours surfing the web!

dazberry

Last few companies I've worked in have had to do this. In one case it was just an management exercise, others had more rational reasoning. The last company prior to this one was a real PITA as it was a web based system that required you to select/sub-select etc. the correct tasks. Current place is just spreadsheets. I have gotten into the habit of writing it all down everyday in my diary, so when I go to fill in one of these forms (be it weekly or monthly depending on the company) there's no head scratching

D.

MOH

Yeah, it's a pain, but it's fairly common.
It's even more of a nuisance when you have to choose from a selection of projects/sub-tasks, which only display the ones you're currently allocated to, based on some arcane system of teams and projects which bear little relation to what's actually going on.

But hey, that's progress.

croo

I think this is a common requirement myself. When I think about it I don't think I ever had a job where it was not required.

With the right tools it's not as much hassle as it sounds. These days I use Mylyn in eclipse and it tracks the time worked on tasks - of course outside of coding I need something else. I use gnoTime for that.

yenoah

Do people not find this patronising? annoying? an ironic waste of time? insulting? You are professionals who are highly skilled in a very complex field. Yet you are treated like packers in a warehouse clocking on and off. Surely properly managed projects negate the need for this ?

Colonel Panic

It's just annoying management nonsense, you can get annoyed about it or play the game and get on with the real work.

Luckily in my current position, also at a small company, we don't have this sort of thing but I've been there!

DublinWriter

yenoah wrote: »

Do people not find this patronising? annoying? an ironic waste of time? insulting? You are professionals who are highly skilled in a very complex field. Yet you are treated like packers in a warehouse clocking on and off. Surely properly managed projects negate the need for this ?

No, but maybe you do?

From my own experience I find the sort of SME ICT company who suddenly introduces this sort of scheme does so in a completely knee-jerk and reactionary way by an incompetent middle-management and it's normally abandoned within a few months.

All serious consulting and legal firms require their professionals to submit client-billing hours at the end of the week.

Do you think that maybe as an IT professional the fact that you feel aggrieved doing this is a little symbolic of the immaturity of the IT profession as a whole?

yenoah

DublinWriter wrote: »

No, but maybe you do?

From my own experience I find the sort of SME ICT company who suddenly introduces this sort of scheme does so in a completely knee-jerk and reactionary way by an incompetent middle-management and it's normally abandoned within a few months.

All serious consulting and legal firms require their professionals to submit client-billing hours at the end of the week.

Do you think that maybe as an IT professional the fact that you feel aggrieved doing this is a little symbolic of the immaturity of the IT profession as a whole?

So you start off by saying its a knee jerk reaction. Is that not in itself, inherently annoying?

Well legal firms and consultants client billing hours is one of the most contentious issues amongst the professional classes. Anecdotallly, its ambiguous at best and there is plenty of evidence that a lot of it is made up. The professional classes have had a case to answer for years.

The IT profession as a whole is maturing IMO. I mean, its only 10 years ago that "IT Pros" could "DO Everything". The processes are maturing, and people are becoming specialised.

A well run project, defines requirements, divide and conquer, work sheets (scrum) etc. It can be very easy to monitor progress or lack of it if implemented properly.

If someone asked me to document my day on a 15 minute basis, yes I would find that not just annoying, but quite sickening. Would probably lead to my moving.

kayos

amen wrote: »

not necessarily. I could be down for a task that based on prior agile takes on average 4 hours but maybe I'm dossing and I spend 3 hours surfing the web!

Ah but you see that can be said for the same time sheet that the OP has to fill in. Its about being honest. We could all pad out our time sheets/agile tasks or what ever with what ever we want.

All I was saying was if the OP company went agile, this is all part and parcel of the process in terms of filling in what ever tool you use with how much you've done how much you've to do. That with the scrum teams Iteration Backlog ends up in a burn down chart on a team level.

A bit of tinkering and you could get burn downs on each team member. Cause let be honest most places seem to forget that Iteration planning is not there to assign work to people but it happens.

We use Rally here and you can not even create a task without assigning an owner!

Hobbes

yenoah wrote: »

Do people not find this patronising? annoying? an ironic waste of time? insulting? You are professionals who are highly skilled in a very complex field. Yet you are treated like packers in a warehouse clocking on and off. Surely properly managed projects negate the need for this ?

On the other side of that, you are a hired professional to paid to do a job and they need to account for your time so they can cost it against whatever it is you are working on.

yenoah

Hobbes wrote: »

On the other side of that, you are a hired professional to paid to do a job and they need to account for your time so they can cost it against whatever it is you are working on.

If using an agile method, its all already taken care of. People get assigned a set of tasks to be done by a certain time. Are they done or not? (yes/no) In an agile process, a team update might take place a few times a week.

p

yenoah wrote: »

Do people not find this patronising? annoying? an ironic waste of time? insulting? You are professionals who are highly skilled in a very complex field. Yet you are treated like packers in a warehouse clocking on and off. Surely properly managed projects negate the need for this ?

Don't be so egotistical. If you're running a company it's incredibly useful to know roughly what your staff are spending their time on. If someone spends 10 hours on one project in one month for ongoing maintenance, they can plan better in the future for that.

The only reason to be worried is if you're concerned they might find out you're spending too much time on boards

yenoah

p wrote: »

Don't be so egotistical. If you're running a company it's incredibly useful to know roughly what your staff are spending their time on. If someone spends 10 hours on one project in one month for ongoing maintenance, they can plan better in the future for that.

The only reason to be worried is if you're concerned they might find out you're spending too much time on boards

so many assumptions! god bless the boards.ie dev forum. Never fails:cool:

DublinWriter

yenoah wrote: »

If using an agile method, its all already taken care of.

No it's not. Agile is good, but not good enough to predict resource consumption.

I've been in IT long enough to see these fads come and go, Kaizen, TCM, Six-Sigma...here we go again with another methodology to try and replace 'common-sense' in those who should know better and to further enrich the big six consultancies.

yenoah

I'll get my coat, pleasure as always.

Trojan

I work for myself - I run RescueTime on all my laptop and find it interesting and sometimes useful. Also shows I spend too long on boards

Colonel Panic

yenoah wrote: »

I'll get my coat, pleasure as always.

A bit melodramatic no?

People are just disagreeing with the sentiment that it's all sickening and disgusting. Programming is just a job, and misguided though it may be, people who don't understand what's involved (and don't care - why should they?) need to know what you're doing.

yenoah

Colonel Panic wrote: »

A bit melodramatic no?

People are just disagreeing with the sentiment that it's all sickening and disgusting. Programming is just a job, and misguided though it may be, people who don't understand what's involved (and don't care - why should they?) need to know what you're doing.

sweety where's your sense of humour?:cool:

Colonel Panic

There was nothing on the time sheet about sense of humour requirements!