The Effectivity of Time Tracking

Our management team decided to cancel entry and leave time tracking. Task time tracking will continue using our Project Server according to the project plans.

I don’t think time tracking enforces anything. Since it measures the time you were at work, not the time you are actually working, and not how well you manage your time.

In some cases, the time log showed things the PMs already knew – because of flex time, people would come in late and work late, not using team collaboration effectively. The PMs did not use this information to give feedback to these people, and accepted it. So no use there.

Since PMs don’t really care how you spend your time, as long as you keep your commitments, it doesn’t matter to them how much time you actually spent doing them. It could be said that if you went over your committed plan, than you don’t spend your time effectively, but there’s no direct correlation, and again, it matters more to keep your commitments.

When I looked into the project plans and compared the big variations, it was always the integrations that exceeded their planned time a lot (I read it as bad estimation). This is where Project comes in handy, as it shows you more detailed information.

So apart from tracking missing days, which are needed for different finance and HR calculations, I see the cancellation as a good thing – less maintenance and related costs of time log activities. I don’t think that it sends a message of trust to the employees, while not losing anything.

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