Tracking Engineering Time - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

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Author: jacobian.org
Full Title: Tracking Engineering Time - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Category:#articles
Document Tags: soft skills time management
Summary: Tracking Engineering Time provides a playbook for managers to better understand and allocate engineering time. The article highlights the challenges that managers without engineering backgrounds or those leading engineering from a distance face in understanding how engineers spend their time. To address this, the author suggests measuring time and dividing it into buckets that align with activities that influence output, such as features, debt, and toil. By monitoring and making adjustments based on these buckets, managers can gain insights into how time is being spent and make informed decisions to improve outcomes.
URL: https://jacobian.org/2024/feb/7/tracking-engineering-time/

How should a manager in this situation discover what their team is working on and figure out if their time is being allocated correctly? (View Highlight)
As your staff tracks time, they should attribute it to a few major categories. I recommend starting with at least these three: (View Highlight)
You can add other buckets if they’re important to reveal information you care about. A few optional buckets that I sometimes use are: (View Highlight)
I’d caution you against having too many buckets. 3-5 seems fine, but there’s diminishing returns of adding more granular buckets. And, the more categories you add, the more time people will need to spend filling out timesheets, and thus compliance and accuracy will go down. Make this as easy as possible by having just a few buckets, and not insisting on super-detailed granularity. (View Highlight)
I suggest simply gathering data for a while, maybe a month, before starting to make major adjustments. This data tends to be noisy, so giving it some time to shake out. Then, you can start to nudge teams towards the outcomes you want to see. (View Highlight)

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