Its primary use is to determine what people's actual load is. By load, I mean what percentage of the day is actually spent working off tasks that need to be done, versus attending meetings, reading email, helping other people with problems, etc.
We'd always used a load factor of 70%, but that was just a made up figure with no basis. In practice, I'm seeing it range from 25% (for me) to about 80% (for a couple of the contractors). For this figure to be useful, people have to actually report what they're doing, which people don't like to do, so it takes a few iterations for this to actually tell what it ought to.
Secondly, I use it to make pretty charts (one of which is the icon associated with this entry). Don't underestimate the value of pretty graphs, they look cool and make people aware of what is going on, especially if you can explain what they mean.
I got resistance for years about it, and finally decided to do it piecemeal. I did the pretty graphs first, then pointed out that while they were pretty, they didn't tell us real info because of what I call Mystery Task syndrome - if people don't report all of what they work on, then what they are working on are Mystery Tasks, and that screws up the reporting.
One final thing it is good for is identifying when people go off on tangents. A good example was last week, when someone started reporting on a new JIRA item that wasn't in the list. This put them over their work budget for the period, and we ended up postponing it because it was less important than other stuff going on.
But the reality is, it's a tough sell. It seems to duplicate what MS Project does (though it doesn't), and people are resistant to reporting their time. I treat it as a bit of a joke and that helps, but I do find myself explaining over and over that it's not for tracking people, it's for determining if we will finish by our target date.
Its primary use is to determine what people's actual load is. By load, I mean what percentage of the day is actually spent working off tasks that need to be done, versus attending meetings, reading email, helping other people with problems, etc.
We'd always used a load factor of 70%, but that was just a made up figure with no basis. In practice, I'm seeing it range from 25% (for me) to about 80% (for a couple of the contractors). For this figure to be useful, people have to actually report what they're doing, which people don't like to do, so it takes a few iterations for this to actually tell what it ought to.
Secondly, I use it to make pretty charts (one of which is the icon associated with this entry). Don't underestimate the value of pretty graphs, they look cool and make people aware of what is going on, especially if you can explain what they mean.
I got resistance for years about it, and finally decided to do it piecemeal. I did the pretty graphs first, then pointed out that while they were pretty, they didn't tell us real info because of what I call Mystery Task syndrome - if people don't report all of what they work on, then what they are working on are Mystery Tasks, and that screws up the reporting.
One final thing it is good for is identifying when people go off on tangents. A good example was last week, when someone started reporting on a new JIRA item that wasn't in the list. This put them over their work budget for the period, and we ended up postponing it because it was less important than other stuff going on.
But the reality is, it's a tough sell. It seems to duplicate what MS Project does (though it doesn't), and people are resistant to reporting their time. I treat it as a bit of a joke and that helps, but I do find myself explaining over and over that it's not for tracking people, it's for determining if we will finish by our target date.
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