Using Software for Time Management
One of the most common issues for software companies is having the ability to track the attendance and manage their employees’ time. This is not unique to the industry, however, most businesses will have the same type of issues and be facing a similar lack of technological ability to properly monitor their employees’ time.
A company obviously needs to make sure that the people working on certain tasks are doing just that. They should be using their time efficiently and are not spending too much time on unproductive tasks. When they start to actually study this within their organization they are often surprised by the results.
Critical to time management is the ability to let the worker who exactly what they are supposed to be working on and then track the amount of real time they spend working on that task. Most executives will overestimate how much time they spend working on something productively and this leads to high expectations on the workforce. As a result executives can often be quite shocked to find that only around half of an employee’s time is spend on productive working. Worse still, they then find that the cause for this is often not with the employee but in their own corporate infrastructure and project systems.
A key factor in maximizing the amount of time spent on productive work is to make sure that employee time is not wasted on unnecessarily complex administration and by cutting back red take. One way of doing this is automation but equally important are regular project meetings and reports. Meetings need to be short and productive rather than the usual long drawn out affairs where people end up going away feeling that they have accomplished very little. Managers need to look at both the number and length of meetings and take steps to improve this.
Going back to basics and using the rule of 80/20 remains relevant even in the most high-tech environments like the software development business. Around 20% of your organization will deliver 80% of the value so you need to find out what the other sections do and maximize their potential through the adoption of appropriate methodologies and business practices.
