For a number of weeks I’ve been research time tracking solutions. Between the three of us at Tauri-Tec we have identified the need to be able to more accurately track the amount of time we spend on individual projects, which should aid us in a number of ways.
Firstly, we should be able to quote more accurately for future work. The issue here is being able to judge the pace someone works at. This obviously differs, depending on their experience with not only the language, but also the project itself. The modification might only be a small one, but if you don’t know the project it’s going to take you longer to make the modifications required than someone that knows the project inside out. Also some people just seem to work faster on some things than other. I know back when I joined the company, that Ed was constantly over estimating how long it would take to complete parts of a project. Now you could be thinking “what’s the problem you get some down time”, but in all reality it actually means we are losing money. For example, it could be that we have several parts to a particular project that need to be done with a short space of time. If we have over estimated how long it will take to complete a particular part, then it might lead us to pay someone else to complete the other part, which is more expensive than one of us working on it. Not only in monetary terms, but also checking it against our QA standards. So having data on how quickly people work both; full time employees and freelancers that we use, will allow us to better judge costs, which also means we can be even more competitive when quoting for work.
Secondly, and this is actually something Damian pointed out. It’s nice for a customer to be able to see where the money is being split when they receive an invoice. Damian recently engaged a lawyer to help with drawing up some particular contracts. Attached to the invoice was a break down of not only what work was done, but also a brief outline of the number of hours that were spent doing different activities. Our company has clients that pay a maintenance contract, where they pay us to monitor their system, apply small updates, and fix any bugs that pop up from time to time. So this would be very helpful for these clients. However, and this is more important for us, we can more accurately monitor the amount of time we spend on these maintenance contracts, and then modify the service agreement for them. For example, if we aren’t spending as much time that our agreement covers, then we can re-visit this agreement and decrease the cost. Alternatively, if we are spending way over the amount of time that our service agreement covers, then we can again sit down with the client and discuss the possible need to increase the service agreement so that it covers the man hours that we are spending on their system.
So now we have determined the need, I’ve been given the job of finding a solution. As I see it I have two options, take some pre-existing time tracking software which nearly matches our specific needs, or write my own.