> Tracking hours is a pain in the ass and we do it mostly in Jira tied to tasks but the data we get is invaluable.
The important point here is to actually feed that information back to the people that originally did the estimates and also to the people that are (to them) "pointlessly" clicking on the "start work", "stop work" buttons on their JIRA tickets.
Most of the time, this sort of timesheet stuff is fed to an accountant somewhere that turns it into magical "earned value" based on inaccurate project schedules that are always 99% complete but with a vertical S curve.
Yeah we mostly don’t do the start/stop thing with timers. For the most part we just have folks guesstimate the hours spent when the close or reassign a ticket. Hour or half hour precision is good enough.
We don’t hide hours and use them as a tool for raising flags as part of our weekly or bi-weekly reviews with team leads and part of our client reporting. If a lead sees someone spending too much time on a task it raises a flag on whether the task is unexpectedly large, impacting schedule and/or scope or if someone is potentially slacking off or having some other personal issues etc.
We are primarily remote and, like most agencies, will backfill sometimes with contractors. We’ve been hosed a few times with people sandbagging hours so making all this data public and reviewed has been a great way to hold everyone accountable.
The important point here is to actually feed that information back to the people that originally did the estimates and also to the people that are (to them) "pointlessly" clicking on the "start work", "stop work" buttons on their JIRA tickets.
Most of the time, this sort of timesheet stuff is fed to an accountant somewhere that turns it into magical "earned value" based on inaccurate project schedules that are always 99% complete but with a vertical S curve.