Timesheets in a Digital Agency
Submitted by Kellen Rodney on Wed, 2012-10-03 14:45
The question of whether or not to use timesheets is one that every agency has faced, and one that needs to challenged on many levels. Teams who have never logged time shudder in fear at the prospect but it doesn’t need to a scary experience. This got me thinking of how we could adapt an essential practice into a dynamic agency that prides itself on being agile and innovative.
You’re asking people to tick off hours into a prescribed big brother model – confining them in a box and setting boundaries for their interaction with the work they’re engaged in.
There are obviously numerous business benefits to logging time on client work – from tracking and accountability for billed hours, to capacity and workforce planning - but how can you tell a creative who has fallen in love with a campaign or project to only spend one hour a day on it?
With the nature of our business being what it is, community managers are playing digital tick-tac-toe between client platforms, moderating content, creating content and reporting on results. Recording 10 minutes for Client A here and 15 minutes for Client B there, means constant bouncing around between tasks. At the end of the day this creates more of a distraction that could rather be channeled into more productive outputs.
We’ve explored time management app’s like Hit List (disclaimer Mac users), logging hours in shared spreadsheets, and even setting up 30 minute playlists to monitor time better - the end of the playlist signals the end of the allocated time. In practicing Scrum, we’ve tried to use points estimation of time and effort to align outputs to actual time on accounts.
Over the next few weeks I am going to run a few practical exercises based on team deliverables. I will conduct research into how useful or valid this process can be in an agile creative agency and how we tailor it to suit our needs.
Trial of the above techniques to see which teams find a happy place that allows them to track time with minimal interference. At the end of this all I suspect that no matter how efficient the process is, we’re going to have to just bite the bullet and get it done.
Please share any success stories, experiences or suggestions!
(It took me approximately 2 hours to write this blog post)
