How do you coordinate time management within your team?
Hi there :)
I’d be interested to hear about your experience with time tracking. How was this feature implemented in your workspace? Did you need to make any adjustments?
In my experience, the biggest challenge was getting the team to actually use the timer. I wasn’t able to successfully implement that change, so for now, the team splits the workday based on the tasks completed.
One tool that proved very helpful was the time entry reminder — it really helped us avoid forgetfulness.
I really like the enhancements Wrike has been making to the timesheet. Being able to prepopulate based on status, due dates, and other Fields makes mass entry easy. I have a lot of standard work in Wrike along with project tasks so being able to quickly record an hour and 1/2 hour to specific items like meetings or desk time is helpful for us. I typically record my time in 5 minutes increments instead of using the timer - i round to 5 minutes anyways to account for the time it takes to switch between tasks.
I second the time entry reminder.
However I have to disagree on the Timer.
As we work fairly agile (quickly jump from project to project) this tends to not work as well for us...
We still are strugling to figure out how automatically (without the API) forbid Timeentries in past (everything past the prior quarter)...
We are leveraging Effort and Bookings, later we will tackle Actual...broke teams down to job role to make it all make sense....slow roll and avoiding timesheets completely.
We have really struggled with getting teams on board with tracking actual time. At the moment we are focusing on teams adding effort required to all of the tasks so we can capacity plan and manage resources more effectively. The next step will be time tracking however for some teams I don't think it will ever be a priority and we can only push it so much. The few teams who are tracking their actual time are finding it very useful to compare against the effort that was predicted so this can be adjusted for future projects. I think some teams have reminders set up or they have a weekly recurring task on a Friday to update/check efforts for tasks in the next week and add time entries for the past week if needed.
We have a directive from the top to time track, and it is part of an individual's performance review if they don't do it. If a leader requires it, it makes enforcement much easier.
We've done something similar to what Amy described. Timesheets aren't a requirement for our creative team so to help our them think about how to manage their time and to help our project manager with resource assignment, I created a custom field for level of effort with a basic high / medium / low estimate for number of hours that's determined for each task as we receive it through our request form -
We have a chart that shows all tasks assigned per team member grouped by high / medium / low that the PMs can use when deciding who to assign things to. Since it's a rough estimate, the PM is able to decide what level of effort to put the task at based on the request info so that alleviates that step from the creative team member. They can always update it, though, if needed.
We faced challenges getting the team to record the hours they spent on projects. Since we can capitalize salaries allocated to projects, we aimed to capture hours worked by job roles.
Instead of tracking time at the task level, we implemented an automation that creates a folder and loads a “Timesheet” CIT for each approved project. The project manager then assigns the relevant team members to these timesheets, so each person has one timesheet per project and is linked to their job role. This approach enables us to track time spent on projects effectively while requiring minimal effort from the project team.
Perhaps next year we’ll be ready to report hours at the task level.