What does /g/ know about team-wide time and task management systems?

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Just a bit of help /g/? Do any of you work for a dystopian employer that requires time tracking for all tasks?

>>58958131
I used to. It wasn't broken down by task though, it was just broken down by client. So at the end of the week you had to punch in how you did X hours for client A, Y hours for client B, and such. Later on they started making you do it every day.

The impression I got was that upper management took this shit very seriously, the middle management that was implementing and running the time-tracking system only cared about having good-looking numbers to report to upper management, and the people actually doing the work just treated it as some bullshit overhead that needn't be taken seriously. just fill in the numbers your boss told you to.

>>58957992
use existing tools such as redmine

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>>58958342
Thanks anon, that looks like something I can directly work with. Much appreciated.

>>58958262
As someone who is not naturally in management, I was certainly resistant to the idea. I imagine it'll be very hard to encourage team members to submit useful information - in some ways that's why I'm including perceived value as a carrot-on-a-stick incentive; at least it's a direct feedback for what doesn't work.

Do you have any perception as to what the strategic mindset of upper management was regarding the data fed up to them?

>>58958428
>>Do you have any perception as to what the strategic mindset of upper management was regarding the data fed up to them?
Well first and foremost what they wanted was accurate billing. Clients would pay our firm for however many hours of work. I think marketing did some stuff with it too, like they wanted to be able to say "Oh yes, we can do X for you, we did it for someone else with about 40 billable hours, so it'll cost you $such-and-such" But mostly it was billing. If you spent a half-hour talking to someone at the client about something, management wanted the client to be paying for that time.

If your managers are doing this for internal reasons they're probably just more concerned with efficiency, and identifying what managers annoyingly call "pain points". That is, if your developers are spending lots of time doing X and not much time on Y, then improving X should be a higher priority than improving Y.

Now assuming for a moment that you like the people whom you manage and want them to be happy, you might try to (gently) game this. Set up your metrics so that they'll show a lot of time being spent on whatever tasks your dev team wants to draw upper management's attention to improving. Then go to your pointy-haired bosses with those numbers and a sales pitch of "fixing this area would be the best way to improve the team's efficiency, here's what we could get done if X took half the time, blah blah blah"

My only other tip for dealing with management is that wearing a tie goes a long way. I was shocked at how much more serious and competent people thought I was, compared to what I actually was, just because I dressed the part.

>>58958578
Thanks for the information - it provided some useful insight.

I work in a company with quite a few development teams and management wants to inform a 'shift in development culture'. So it'll probably be painful for everyone, but perhaps, just maybe, I can try to make something useful come out of it.

Ties are great. I've been a shirt and tie guy all my life, and that's probably what landed me in this mess.

>>58958342
Seconded, using redmine currently. 5407 hours of work tracked :/