Get angry when you use round numbers in your time estimates, because “How could every task possibly take increments of five minutes?!”
Get angry when you use arbitrary non-rounded time entries, because “How am I supposed to determine the average time it takes you to complete a task when there’s so much variance?!”
Gets angry when you spend an hour every day filling out your fucking time cards, because “You’re not supposed to bill for that!”
Gleefully accepts absolute garbage work that you just outsourced to Fivr.
I used to work at a place that required daily progress reports on tasks (this was before agile took off so ‘daily standup’ wasn’t a thing.). So I wrote a script to schedule my git commits throughout the week (so that I had at least one a day), and every afternoon it would pull my git history, generate a summary, and email it to my manager.
He knew it was automated and hated me for it but I had the most consistent and detailed reports. On the upside, it really trained me to make good commit messages. On the downside It really instilled me with a strong “burn the building down” kind of vibe that persists to this day.
I moved from one project in my scaled agile using organisation to another and a week later got a phonecall “why are you billing half an hour a day to admin”
“Um” says I “working out where to put how much time against each of the five rows we’re tracking our work under takes at least that long”
Then management shot themselves in the foot
Step 1. Instruct people that all their time must be allocated to a project task, no more admin time, no more corporate role time.
Step 2. Assign a “tiny” piece of work to a team of 10, so the tiny work costs (10 x number of days to deliver) pdays, but was costed at a reasonable level of 20 pdays.
Step 3. Don’t assign any other work to the team
Step 4. Dissolve the team and scatter the staff 2 weeks later
So by the time the team was dissolved, the work was done but for QA, which was delayed and idle because of a bug found in unit test. At that point it had cost 10 people * 10 full days — a hundred pdays.
Management has been calling former team members asking for them to assign their time to a previous project to get the cost of the work down to its planned amount
I don’t think it’s fraud since it’s billing this part of the organisation for work done for that part of the same, but it really makes a mockery of the idea of tracking time per project being meaningful. Anyway, I’m glad they asked me to lie on MS project in writing
Ask for per-task time tracking
Get angry when you use round numbers in your time estimates, because “How could every task possibly take increments of five minutes?!”
Get angry when you use arbitrary non-rounded time entries, because “How am I supposed to determine the average time it takes you to complete a task when there’s so much variance?!”
Gets angry when you spend an hour every day filling out your fucking time cards, because “You’re not supposed to bill for that!”
Gleefully accepts absolute garbage work that you just outsourced to Fivr.
I used to work at a place that required daily progress reports on tasks (this was before agile took off so ‘daily standup’ wasn’t a thing.). So I wrote a script to schedule my git commits throughout the week (so that I had at least one a day), and every afternoon it would pull my git history, generate a summary, and email it to my manager.
He knew it was automated and hated me for it but I had the most consistent and detailed reports. On the upside, it really trained me to make good commit messages. On the downside It really instilled me with a strong “burn the building down” kind of vibe that persists to this day.
I moved from one project in my scaled agile using organisation to another and a week later got a phonecall “why are you billing half an hour a day to admin”
“Um” says I “working out where to put how much time against each of the five rows we’re tracking our work under takes at least that long”
Then management shot themselves in the foot
Step 1. Instruct people that all their time must be allocated to a project task, no more admin time, no more corporate role time.
Step 2. Assign a “tiny” piece of work to a team of 10, so the tiny work costs (10 x number of days to deliver) pdays, but was costed at a reasonable level of 20 pdays.
Step 3. Don’t assign any other work to the team
Step 4. Dissolve the team and scatter the staff 2 weeks later
So by the time the team was dissolved, the work was done but for QA, which was delayed and idle because of a bug found in unit test. At that point it had cost 10 people * 10 full days — a hundred pdays.
Management has been calling former team members asking for them to assign their time to a previous project to get the cost of the work down to its planned amount
I don’t think it’s fraud since it’s billing this part of the organisation for work done for that part of the same, but it really makes a mockery of the idea of tracking time per project being meaningful. Anyway, I’m glad they asked me to lie on MS project in writing
There’s a certain dramatic irony in the effort to account for labor activity in the business making the actual process of work significantly worse.