Timesheets - You're doing it wrong

Dominic White

 

Timesheets - You're doing it wrong

 When managing teams of "information workers", I believe the use of time sheets is indicative of a management failure. Here's why:

  • If you have to rely on a timesheet to know what your staff are doing - you're doing it wrong
  • If you can't trust your staff to work hard - you have problems a timesheet won't fix
  • If you believe you have too many staff to manage - get more managers
  • If you think anyone completes them accurately - you drank the kool aid
  • If you think the time it takes to actually complete them accurately is worth it - you hate your staff
  • If you manage your business from these inaccurate stats - you're making bad decisions
  • If your senior people have PAs complete their timesheets for them - you're a hypocrite
  • If you spent millions on a new timesheet system, but didn't make it any easier for the staff using the system - you just suck

Sunday, November 20. 2011
Posted by Dominic White in Life
Comments (10) | Trackback (1)

 

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#1 J-P (Reply)
Posted on Sunday, November 20. 2011
Yup, and if you require your staff to submit their time in advance, don't expect any accuracy. I kid you not, some places want the week's time submitted by Friday morning... My favourite response is this: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-04-26/
 
#2 Articulus Reticulus (Reply)
Posted on Monday, November 21. 2011
If your timesheets are a “valuable source of information” when they back up your preconceptions, and “hopelessly inaccurate” when they don't — you're the problem I'd change "you just suck" to "your priorities are badly messed-up", which seems more accurate.
 
#3 Kim White wrote (Link) (Reply)
Posted on Monday, November 21. 2011
That is so on my office wall right now. Thanks Dom
 
#4 Allen Baranov wrote (Link) (Reply)
Posted on Monday, November 21. 2011
Nice.. and how long did it take you to write that blog? And what are you going to log it as? ;)
 
#5 Shaun wrote (Link) (Reply)
Posted on Monday, November 21. 2011
* If you manage information workers yet expect them to use paper or spreadsheet-based timesheets, you're not an information worker. * If you're actually filling out your timesheet in any sort of accurate detail, you're wasting time better spent on developing the Next Big Thing.
 
#6 Haroon (Reply)
Posted on Monday, November 21. 2011
I think all the points made in the post are arguments against time sheets (even) for non information workers. For information workers, the thing that's so evil about time sheets (to me) is that they reinforce the notion that time is related to quality (or results). I would rather a great mind that thought about my problem (and solved it) in 5 minutes rather than a distracted, simple mind that put in 9 hours thinking about it. If you are "doing it right", then you "measure what matters", and if "what matters" to you, is bums in seats.. then it's a safe bet you doing it wrong..
 
#7 jerith (Reply)
Posted on Tuesday, November 22. 2011
I've found that accurately tracking the time I'm spending accurately tracking time is a fairly effective defensive tactic.
 
#8 Wogan wrote (Link) (Reply)
Posted on Wednesday, November 30. 2011
Of course, that all assumes your company is 100% optimized, that none of your projects are billed by the hour, and that you're perfectly happy trusting everyone to always make the best decisions about managing their time (which assumes that everyone involved has a full understanding of the greater context of their work). But that all pales in comparison to the biggest advantage of timesheets: Being able to say "I don't have time for your crap - and here's company-approved proof."
 
#8.1 Dominic White wrote (Link) (Reply)
Posted on Sunday, January 8. 2012
Wogan, I have only ever worked for consultancies, so this isn't coming from a place apart from what you mention. Absolutely, if you sell the work to clients and an hourly basis, then timesheets end up as a necessary evil. However, there are many more ways to structure your contracts, the most obvious being on a fixed price deliverable basis (this is where the industry is going for IT projects due to overruns in what I've seen). There are also ways to you can bill by day. Either way, if the way you're selling projects to clients forces you into poor workforce management techniques, you need to fix that. You should manage your staff to produce an excellent deliverable within cost-effective timeframes, and the client should expect an excellent deliverable, not force you to manage on a per-hour basis. On to your next point, you are re-enforcing my point about timesheets used as a management technique. If your staff's use of their time is both understood and structured by a timesheet, then the manager is failing to have proper conversations with their team and instead using the timesheet as a crutch. As for your final point, using timesheets to cover-your-ass implies a wholly unhealthy culture already. The idea that you need to waste time to prevent others sniping your time into more wastage implies a manager has failed to protect their team from others, or is asking their team to engage in bad work.
 
#9 Dominic Parry (Reply)
Posted on Friday, February 24. 2012
I left my last consulting job purely because of this. Thanks for the great laugh!
 

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