Teamhood – Time Tracking Your Team Actually Enjoys
One of the best things about Teamhood is that it is very versatile and able to adapt to various teams and business fields. This means you won’t find just Kanban or just traditional project management features – you will find both. While time tracking is not traditional to Agile project management, it is a very useful tool no matter the project management method used. Thus we at Teamhood felt it was very important that time tracking is available to our users.
Want to know more about what you can do with it and how to apply it? Keep on reading or watch a short video below to learn everything you need to know.
Track time spent on tasks
The very base of any time tracking feature is the ability to track time. In Teamhood we decided to give you two ways to do that – live tracking or later input. There is no difference which of the two input methods you choose, you can even mix them together. It is simply done to give you and your team an option to choose based on your preference.
To start tracking time live, open the chosen task details and then press the play button in the TimeLogs section – live time tracking will begin immediately. Once the time tracking has started you can close the task details and start working. As the task is being tracked you will see a clock running in the upper right corner of your task board. Once you are finished working on that particular task, press pause in the upper right corner of the task board or in the task details. The tracked time will be immediately logged and you can go on to working on other things.
If you prefer to add in tracked time later you can do so in the TimeLogs section. Open up the task details and press +1 to quickly add 1 hour of tracked time or press “log time” and write in the exact time you have spent on the task as well as when you have worked on it. You can review time tracked for each task in task details and if you have started tracking or added some time by accident, TimeLogs can be deleted there as well.
Compare estimates to tracked time
Simply tracking the time your team spends on tasks is not of much use. To make sure this tracking has a purpose, the data should be used. One of the simplest ways to get insights from time tracking in Teamhood is giving your tasks time estimates. This way, you will allocate a certain amount of time to your project and then will be able to see how many tasks of this project are completed and how much time of the planned time is gone.
All of this information is automatically calculated and easily accessible in the Teamhood Dashboard. At the very top you will see 3 pie charts – first one is showcasing the overall number of tasks in the project and how many of them are done. the second chart will show all of the estimated hours and how many of them have already been used. Lastly, the third chart will visualize how many story points were assigned to tasks and how many of them have been completed. This will give you a quick overview of what is going on and let you compare how many tasks are completed vs how much time of the project is already used up.
However, this is not all. To make sure planning new work and allocating it to team members is easier, you can also see these 3 metrics for each of the members on your team. Thus, when delegating work, you can evaluate both – how many tasks each team member is assigned already and how much time they are going to take. This allows to distribute resources more evenly instead of overloading a certain person on a team. As being assigned many small tasks sometimes is still less work than having a few very big ones.
Get valuable insights from Time Sheet report
While Dashboard provides a quick overview of the time estimations and usage in the project, this just isn’t enough when you need to do a deeper analysis or bill clients. Do not worry though, Teamhood has got you covered. Time Sheet report is a powerful tool where you can slice and review time tracking data in any way needed.
Time Sheet report can be filtered by dates, boards, tags and task assignees and then the results can be grouped together by items, users, tags, moths, weeks or board rows. With all of these options you are in full control and can choose to see just what is important to you. Interested in how much work was done for a certain company on a particular week by each of your team members? Easy, choose the dates, the company tag and group the results by user. Curious how productive your team was from week to week? Simply define the time period and group by week. All of the time tracking data is in your hands and ready to be used.
Lastly, this report does not only show you how much time was tracked for each task, it also shows how much time was estimated and how these two metrics differ. You can see the difference in time or percentages and they are color coded so you can quickly spot any delays. If there is no difference between estimated and tracked time or the team racked less time than estimated, the difference metrics will be green. But if the work took longer than estimated, the difference metrics will be displayed in red. This allows you to quickly look over the problem areas and see if anything should be done to optimize the process.
Getting your team to track time
The time tracking feature in Teamhood offers a variety of benefits, however for you to reap the results your team has to onboard for tracking time and this is not always that easy. In many offices time tracking is a controversial topic – the managers love the idea of getting more data on how to optimize work and the employees to feel like this is yet another tool to control their work and actions. Thus, before you start time tracking, make sure to explain why this is done, how it helps to avoid thieves of time, and get your team on board.
One of the easiest ways to do that is to make sure you will not try and hold power over your employees with the tracked data. This is not meant to calculate every minute of your team’s work hours, but rather explore how the team is meeting estimates and if the project is staying on track. Your team should know the reasons why time tracking is being implemented – whether is to bill clients, identify issues in the process, or as a tool to notice and solve any upcoming issues. Without this communication, it will be too easy for them to assume that you are simply tracking time to control them and this should definitely not be a part of your plan.
Looking for a time tracking solution? Here is a review of the best Kanban time management solutions.
Get started with Teamhood
Ready to enjoy all of the time tracking benefits in your Kanban board? Register for a free Teamhood account and try it out for yourself.
Apply Time Tracking in your industry
Time tracking is a valuable tool for people working in various fields. For engineering teams it allows to evaluate project progress and if it is going to be delivered on time.
For accounting agencies it eases client billing by providing exact data on the effort spent in each case.
And marketing teams can enjoy more predictability by comparing data from previous and current projects.
Already using Teamhood? Find out more about the other features and become a master of your projects:
Teamhood Task Board – Unleash the Real Power of Visualization
Passionate content marketer looking to bring better solutions to the project management space.
2020 - Present Marketing specialist at Teamhood.
2014 - 2020 Marketing manager for Eylean.
