Time Cards should start at the Top
October 10th, 2008 by Bruce P. HenryToday we were going over our time card design. It is really coming along nicely. We’ve been strongly influenced by a few assumptions that we made early on and I’d like to get them out there and see what our blog readers have to say about ‘em.
One of the primary assumptions that we made was that there are really two kinds of people in this world
- People who want to time card and already have time card software
- People who don’t have time card software and don’t want to time card
This makes integration with existing systems like FreshBooks, Harvest, and others a fairly high priority for us. Nobody wants to have to enter time in two systems when those systems could just talk to each other. Right?
Also, we are assuming that either the majority of an organization needs to be filling out time cards or pretty much nobody in the organization does. This means that at some kind of high level you need to be able to force the time card interface for everyone in your workspace. If it is not mandatory it should still be optional on a person by person basis.
On a related but tangential aside, when we rolled out time cards at Expedia we did it initially using a small product called ClickTime. We were quite happy with it at the time as it did pretty much everything we needed. Expedia now uses CA’s Clarity and at least several of their folks have referred to it as “the most f**ked up system ever.” But that’s not my point at all.
What is my point is that the time we rolled time cards out I think we made a big mistake. We said that people at the Director level and above did not have to track their time. I now think that this sends completely the wrong message.
Look, if the whole idea of time cards is to get a better handle on where your valuable resources are being spent, and your highly friggin’ compensated execs are highly compensated because… well… they’re so friggin’ valuable, then it follows that they of all people should be tracking their time via time cards. Time cards should start from the top down.
Okay… breathe Bruce, breathe..
Anyway, what do y’all think of our time card assumptions? Comment early, comment often.
(P.S. - Nick Molnar wins the Best Comment prize for his comment on Playing Games with Collaboration. Congrats Nick! I’ll be in touch to get you your fabulous prize!)
October 10th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Timely Haiku
Time knows no status!
Tracking it, a noble act -
Clocks punch’d deserve it.
October 10th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
i think for anything to be successful, it requires endorsement and adoption at the top. you can’t have management dictate something and not do it themselves. Another criteria for adoption is simplicty. I think if the software is too complex for the individual, there will be resistance. For example I wish I had a desktop widget that would send my time info to a database that i used to generate a report at the end of the day/week.
October 11th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Your basic assumption on who needs to time track unfortunately, excludes me. We need to implement time tracking on a company level. But for the time being we don’t, in hopes for that the time tracker feature you are building, as you say nobody like to do double work with to apps, will completely cover our needs. so to keep our losses at a minimum, we made the decision that we have faith in that the time tracker you are building could do it for us. No need for extra apps and extra costs there. Just liquid.
Our company is based around a meritocracy, do something that’s good company vise, get paid for that, instead of you took this long to do it so that’s what you get paid. That premiers the slow and inefficient worker. Not the one that preformed. Work should be fun, and when you do it right that’s what should be premiered.
So having a time tracking that seamlessly integrates in to what you do, like a time tracker based on the content of liquid, would be PERFECT!
October 11th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
I definitely agree that all should be logging time, from the top down. Time tracking can be an annoying thing, especially when done with slow and lousy software (and I’m looking forward to what you guys produce because I’m sure it will be awesome). So, I believe that the best model is when everyone in the company is logging time in some way. I think sortof like what Andrew said that there should be some nice little desktop app that you can easily click on and off and it will log your time to a specific task and send all the relevant data into the system. Especially good to be able to have a tracker that allows easy switching between tasks because we do alot of that where I come from.
Good luck with it, and looking forward to seeing how it ends up!
October 13th, 2008 at 10:24 am
When time tracking is introduced to any enviroment, such as expedia, it is immediately interpreted as a way for your manager, or whoever to keep track of you. I think that we are human and that is an understandable reaction. Interesting for me, for the first time in my professional career I work for a company that is all billbable time, so whether I am doing FedEx, or helping with an RFP, I need to keep track of where I spend all of time so that my company can bill for it. What is awesome to me is that an administrative position like mine, would be assumed as OverHead, but because my PM’s trust me and think I do good work, I am 75% billable to actual client work that we get paid for. My point being, is that even the President of the company is logging time because this is how WE make money, it’s not just for the hell of it, because if we didn’t……well, we wouldn’t be here. I feel good about filling out my time card because it makes me feel accomplished. I don’t know how much sense I make but this is what I think:)
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:36 pm
We need a timecard solution. We currently use openOffice spreadsheets. It works, but is a real pain.
An important feature is quickbooks export. There is a standard text file format that can import hours.
Also, I would expect Intuit to be receptive to creating an API if you want something fancier - especially if it hooks people on quickbooks.
Another important feature is that Timecards are *not* the same as invoicing. Sometimes a worker will spend 6 hours on a task, and I will only want to bill the client for 3 hours depending on how things went. I still want to track the 6 hours, for paying the worker, but I want to to be able to independantly control how much the client sees. This could be done with an external tool if you export the data in a standard format, but just keep in mind that sometimes the client shouldn’t see the actual hours.
naturall, it should be possible to export the data in multiple useful formats (csv, Restful Api, xml, etc). There’s so much customization required here, it would be good to be flexible and allow people to build glue applications.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:38 pm
BTW, it’s awesome that you allow comments here without creating a login.
I don’t like creating accounts at every site I visit (I have propbably 50 logins), so it’s usually a barrier, and I often don’t comment.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:01 am
Thanks for the note Jeremy. We run Kismet anti-spam on the blog so serious comments like yours get through easy and the spam doesn’t. So we can keep it simple.
I believe we are on track with what you are asking. We won’t do invoicing, our focus is on getting great integration with the LiquidPlanner plan and timesheets, then getting the data out.
December 5th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
We have a need for a timecard solution for use by contractors who work on an hourly basis. Is there any information you can share regarding when this feature may be available?