Hire a consulting firm to come in and evaluate the workflow in your in-house department and the first thing they will ask is if you are keeping track of time. Without timesheets how can you analyze productivity? The challenge here is that no one wants to enter timesheets. Entering time is an extra task for teams that are already overworked. But that’s entirely the point. How do you prove you are overworked if you don’t have any data?
What Time Tracking Will Help You Prove
Management requires empirical data when making decisions. Wouldn’t it be great if you could prove the following?
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We need an additional project manager to handle the load
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The designers have too much work to complete it effectively
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We can turn jobs around more quickly if job requests were filled out more completely
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It would cost a fortune to send this work outside
If you are not tracking time you cannot provide proof that these issues are true. Everyone feels overworked, but management needs data to justify giving you an extra headcount. Imagine a dashboard that shows time data with the following charts:
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A bar chart that shows how many hours per week each Designer logged
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A bar chart that shows the average number of hours needed to complete a job for each client
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A bar chart that shows the number of hours logged by the team for each client
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A bar chart that shows how many hours per week the team spends on Design, Project Management, Creative Direction, etc.
The Power of Data
Show management that the average designer is logging 60 hours a week, that some clients take up way too much time (because of incomplete job requests), and that the team completed thousands of hours of work that would be billed hourly if sent outside. Now you are demonstrating the value of your team and identifying opportunities for improvement.
We have buttons placed strategically throughout JobSuite to make it easy to enter time, but we can’t enter the time for you. If you want to start capturing time, contact us or request a demo. We can build you dashboards that will help motivate the team to enter time, and metrics to help you manage time. Show management the value of the team and the progress you are making with data.
