Selling time management
Communication and working with employees is key to acceptance of a time-tracking system developed in-house
Employee resistance was my first thought when the need arose for better information about how staffers at Chicago-based Bank Administration Institute (BAI) spent their time. The subject was brought up at the mid-March 2001 management team meeting, the weekly get-together of the senior managers who report to the CEO. The worst nightmare of any CTO is deploying a system that will be unpopular with staff, and our best option, time tracking, was no exception. With its legacy in time cards, time tracking definitely falls into the “unpopular” category because it is perceived to be intrusive, time-consuming, and of little benefit.
As the management team discussed the benefits to the business, it became clear that improved cost allocation, better staff scheduling, and management information that would result from a time-tracking system outweighed the implementation hurdles. In the final analysis, we needed to better understand our costs in order to run the business more efficiently. We concluded that the system would work and be successful if it was easy to use, adopted by all departments and management levels (even the CEO), actually used by managers to understand the workings of their departments, and beneficial to all staff.
These four objectives translated into the following basic system requirements:
1. Web-based so that staff could enter their data anywhere and anytime;
2. Constructed so that it would be most convenient to enter time daily, which would provide the most accurate record;
3. Able to track time by project and manager/department-defined activity and provide a rich set of reports so that managers could look at their projects and staff in a number of different ways;
4. Able to combine summary cost-allocation information data with our Great Plains General Ledger accounting information to produce full-cost allocation reports;
5. Benefit employees through online approval and tracking of vacation and personal time off.
Armed with these requirements, the management team evaluated a number of different time-reporting packages and came quickly to the conclusion that a time system would not work without a lot of modifications — most packages were designed for professional time billing or manufacturing applications.
BAI, a professional association devoted exclusively to improving the performance of financial services companies through strategic research and information, education, and training, had very different needs. Our evaluation showed that the cost of in-house development would be cheaper using a vendor’s system because of costs associated with software licenses, needed modifications, and maintenance for a system supporting our approximately 100 employees. We developed the first version of BAI’s TimeTracker system in approximately 30 days and prototyped it in a limited number of departments. We incorporated suggestions and implemented the production version on Oct. 1, 2001.
We are approaching the end of the first year of use and the system has met or exceeded the project objectives:
1. Easy to use. (See adoption success below.)
2. Adopted by all department and management levels. We have had 100 percent employee participation; the CEO and his direct reports have all entered their time consistently.
3. Used by managers to understand the workings of their departments. Old myths about how staffers spent time were debunked, which allowed managers to focus on the correct productivity improvement issues. For example it was previously believed that everything stopped during the time leading up to our largest conference. When this was proved to be untrue, project development schedules and staffing could be rescheduled to be more efficient.
4. Beneficial to all staff. Staff utilization reports have been used throughout the organization for business line and resource planning.
Feeds from the time reporting system are used to generate full-cost allocation reports to allow BAI to better understand project revenue and expenses — something of concern to all CTOs.
