DEV Community: Elina Kukalo

How do you become a 10x developer, and is the game worth the candle?

Elina Kukalo — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 16:40:18 +0000

As the internet tells us, a 10x developer is someone who's 10 times more productive and efficient than an average member of their team.
The question is: Can you acquire such a superpower through lots of hard work and years of experience, or does it emerge from a sort of natural talent one is born with?
And most importantly: Do 10x developers even exist?
What do you think? 🙂

Have you ever used the SPACE framework in your team and what do you think about it? 🚀

Elina Kukalo — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 12:24:12 +0000

I'm writing an article about the SPACE Framework. Would be useful to learn about some real-life experiences of its implementation for developer productivity measurement. Could you guys help? :)

20+ Facts on the Importance of Time Management

Elina Kukalo — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 16:17:23 +0000

Time management encourages us to plan and prioritize tasks following the desired goals. It teaches to develop the right mindset and adopt productive behaviors to be successful in whatever we do. This way, time management helps those who practice it diligently to attain superb performance results in both professional and personal spheres of life.

Still in doubt about all the benefits that time management can produce? Here I summarize some of the most convincing statistics and research findings that are bound to persuade even the most suspicious of readers in the importance of proper time management.

But first, let's see how the majority of people spend their lives:

The US adults sleep roughly 6.8 hours a night (Gallup).
On average, a full-time employed person in the United States works 8.5 hours a day during the standard workweek (US Bureau of Labor Statistics).
The US women use about 2.5 hours a day on household activities, while men – 1.9 hours (US Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Leisure activities – sports, socializing, reading, TV, etc. – take around 5.2 hours a day from the lives of US adults (US Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Worldwide, Internet users spend approximately 144 minutes a day on social media (Statista).

Major Time Wasters at Work

Based on the above data, work consumes a significant portion of our waking time, if not the largest one. Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean people spend these hours productively – distractions and time wasters in the workplace are extremely common:

89% of employees waste at least a part of their working time each day: 31% of workers waste 30 minutes a day, another 31% – 1 hour a day, and 16% waste roughly 2 hours (Salary.com).
64% of workers surf the web for entertainment and personal stuff while at work (Entrepreneur).
50% of employees get distracted on texting and phone calls during a workday, 27% – on snack and smoke breaks, and 23% get distracted on talking to colleagues (Forbes).
An employee may spend as much as 30 hours per week just checking on new emails (Inc.).
Executives’ meetings eat up nearly 23 hours per week these days – a massive amount of time, considering that managers spent less than 10 hours a week on meetings in 1960’s (Harvard Business Review).

The Real Costs of Poor Time Management

Inadequate time management inevitably results in work delays and, thereby, makes companies suffer due to significant financial losses. However, unproductive behaviors – a good sign of one’s failure to manage time adequately – are also linked to some hidden costs. And unfortunately, these costs affect both employed individuals and businesses alike:

Expenses linked to unnecessary emails equal $1,800 per employee a year (Atlassian).
Repetitive and duplicate tasks cost companies about $5,000 per employee a year, while an ineffective search for information and people costs $7,000 (Mohsen Attaran et al.).
The annual cost of unnecessary meetings for US businesses amounts to $37 billion (Lucid Meetings).
On average, project delays entail cost overruns of up to 20% over the initial budgets. And in 3.3% of cases, cost overruns due to delays may exceed original estimates by 50% (Cornerstone Projects Ltd.).
Time leakages that happen due to untracked emails and meetings, as well as delays in timesheet completion, result in a more than 38% loss of billable revenue (Time Is Money).
Higher procrastination rates are linked to lower employee income and shorter employment periods (Brenda Nguyen et al.)

“A single point increase in procrastination on a 5-point scale is associated with approximately a $15,000 drop in salary… and 322 fewer days of employment”
Brenda Nguyen et al.

What Can You Do to Manage Time Better?

According to Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, about 20% of people are chronic procrastinators – they are simply unable to engage in work without postponing anything due to psychological and health-related factors. But most of us don’t have a good excuse for not dealing with costly delays and time wasters. All we need to do to address the problem once and for all is refocus, alter our workplace environments and apply the right techniques:

1. Try flexible work arrangements

Remote employees don’t need to spend time traveling to work. Instead, they have more chances to attend to personal matters than those working from the office. Thus, full-time remote workers tend to be happier and more satisfied with their work-life balance and jobs (Business Insider).

2. Look for a place with fair compensation and reasonable policies

When employees are satisfied with organizational strategies and policies, they show good time management skills two times more often than unsatisfied workers. And those happy with their compensation tend two have good time management skills four times more frequently than those unhappy about it (Muluken Genetu Chanie et al.).

3. Keep motivation high

More motivated people tend to show better time management behaviors – including planning and estimation – than those not interested in what they do (J. A. Francis-Smith & Ivan T. Robertson).

4. Enjoy the process

One’s ability to attain long-term goals and avoid procrastination largely depends not only on the level of their persistence but also on the degree of enjoyment with the process (Harvard Business Review).

5. Stop multitasking

Switching from one task to another, you waste a lot of time. After getting distracted on something as small and insignificant as texting and responding to emails, it may take you up to 15 minutes to return to more serious and essential professional duties (The New York Times).

6. Avoid overworking

There’s no point in working more than 40 hours a week and 8 hours a day since it’s nearly impossible to be productive staying on tasks for longer than that. Thus, working overtime doesn’t mean you accomplish more things in an effective way. Overworking depletes your mental resources and increases the risk of burnout, which harms productivity a lot (Inc.).

7. Track your time

Time trackers, such as actiTIME, assist in identifying time wasters and inefficient team behaviors. But to take full advantage of time tracking, you have to fill in timesheets regularly. Daily time tracking is characterized by greater accuracy and, thus, prevents productivity leaks by as much as 80% (Time Is Money).

Time Management Benefits

Research findings also reveal that time management fosters a boost in productivity and assists in attaining desired results more efficiently. Besides, it promotes health and helps individuals lead more balanced lives. These outcomes are indeed worth striving for:

In such stressful and deadline-oriented professions as event organization, adequate time management is associated with better team performance. It allows employees to adhere to schedules and fulfill work requirements within a predefined timeframe (Nor Lela Ahmad et al.)
A well-developed sense of control over time helps reduce the psychological strain one experiences when in need to meet both professional and family-related demands (Steve M. Jex & Tina C. Elacqua).
When mastering time management principles, individuals start to spend more hours on high-priority work and, as a result, they go through an increase in personal productivity and satisfaction (Brandon L. Hall & Daniel E. Hursch).
Regular and accurate time tracking can solve the problem of billable time leakage and, thus, increase business revenues by up to 61% (Time Is Money).

So, with an adequate approach to time management, you will become able to achieve your goals with greater ease while increasing your personal or business revenues and evading the hidden costs of low productivity. Undoubtedly, these benefits make time management one of the key ingredients in the recipe for professional success.

What Is Time Management and Why Is It Important?

Elina Kukalo — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 17:30:00 +0000

Have you ever found yourself wishing to have more time in a day? Do you agree that fitting all the planned tasks and keeping up with all the scheduled events within a 24-hour limit is too often extremely hard, if not impossible? Then, like most of us, you probably think that by mastering time management, you’ll become able to avoid the intense race against deadlines, complete work without any rush and obtain more spare hours to do all the things you always wanted to do.

This way of thinking is definitely correct. However, before trying on any of the time management techniques promoted by all-wise productivity gurus – regardless of how promising and effective these techniques might be – it would help to get to know the basics. To assist you with this, this article explores the concept of time management, as well as the benefits and the meaning of the practice for modern individuals (coders and developers included).

What’s the Point in Time Management?

Time management is all about control and balance. It is the process of planning your tasks and objectives within a certain timeframe and regulating your performance in a way that fosters an optimal use of time resources.

To clarify this definition, let’s see which steps you need to undertake in order to manage time well:

Identify what you want to do;
Estimate how much it will take to complete each task;
Evaluate how much time you have at your disposal;
Schedule the task(s) considering your estimates and deadlines;
Track your performance and use of time;
Evaluate how efficient you are in adhering to the plan and meeting the objectives;
Based on the final evaluation results, make corrections to your time management process if needed.
Repeat the above steps one by one.

By going through this cycle from the start to the end, you will distribute time across different activities more efficiently since you’re going to have a clear picture of your entire work scope and see how much time you can and must devote to every single task. Besides, you will improve your time management skills.

Estimation and planning mistakes are likely to happen at first if you have no prior experience. But stay patient, analyze time tracking data consistently, try to detect your mistakes, and you’re bound to get better at managing time and attain the sought-for results shortly.

Time Management Skills and Techniques: What’s the Difference?

On the Internet, there are myriads of articles listing various techniques and hacks one can utilize to manage time better. Prioritizing, time blocking, distraction blocking and the Pomodoro method are among the most popular ones these days. However, according to Erich C. Dierdorff, using these tools prior to developing time management skills is rather pointless:

“For example, would anyone seriously expect that purchasing a good set of knives, high-end kitchen equipment, and fresh ingredients would instantly make someone a five-star chef? Certainly not. Similarly, using a scheduling app without the prerequisite time management skills is unlikely to produce positive time management outcomes.”

So, which skills is Dierdorff talking about? They are:

Awareness – The ability to judge how much time you have and the understanding that this vital resource is limited.
Arrangement – The ability to organize tasks and schedules in a way that allows for effective use of time.
Adaptation – The ability to monitor your own behaviors, analyze how well you use time and make prompt adjustments to multiple external factors and changing plans.

Obviously, it takes some effort to develop these skills. To start out with something, Dierdorff suggests:

Creating a time budget and treating time like money,
Analyzing how efficient you are in time estimation,
Finding your peak productivity hours,
Applying calendaring tools to plan everything and make schedule updates quickly,
Breaking down overly challenging goals into smaller ones,
Striving to reduce time wasters,
Adopting a simple time tracker to stay aware of your progress.

By the way, if you decide to proceed with the latter recommendation, you can try out actiTIME – this tool has a straightforward timesheet interface and is very user-friendly. Plus, you can download actiTIME Chrome Extension to track every minute spent on tasks automatically and get a highly accurate overview of your productivity trends.

Here’s Why Time Management Is Good for You

Time management produces plenty of amazing benefits both for individuals and teams. Some of the main ones include:

Higher productivity thanks to more efficient work organization, a stronger focus on most important tasks and optimal use of your energy levels;
Lower stress since you’ll get a chance to better your work-life balance and learn how to avoid any rush with smartly created schedules and plans;
Enhanced quality of work because it’s easier to prevent mistakes and pay attention to details when you don’t have to be always in a hurry;
Enhanced forecasting due to regular engagement in task estimation, which will add another crucial item to your professional skill set and maximize chances for success in all your undertakings;
Stronger sense of self-efficacy since when you never miss a deadline and achieve goals infallibly, you start to feel more confident and accomplished.

Considering all these benefits, it’s valid to conclude without any exaggeration that time management is one of the keys to superior work outcomes, professional growth, more fulfilled and happy life. This practice helps to navigate the chaos of present-day life with ease, though you still have to invest some dedication to understand how time management works and how to implement it properly. But regardless of that, the ultimate value of time management most definitely outweighs all the risks and troubles of learning.

A Brief Guide to Time Blocking: Master Your Schedule and Mind

Elina Kukalo — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 09:47:15 +0000

Today we live in a highly demanding world that throws new challenges, responsibilities and distractions our way every single day. If you aspire to be successful and lead a balanced life, you have no other choice but to manage the ever-increasing piles of tasks ably and be successful in staying focused no matter what.

One of the best things that can help you attain these two objectives is time blocking. This highly effective time management technique boosts productivity by promoting smart scheduling and discouraging multitasking.

What Is Time Blocking?

To understand what time blocking is and get a hint of its benefits, let’s compare two schedule examples:

As you can see, when one designs a schedule following the time blocking principle, they divide a day into several blocks dedicated to working on a specific task (or a series of tasks) and nothing else. Thereby, time blocking brings a greater sense of order into your daily workflow and makes it easier for you to avoid distractions.

In contrast, a schedule of a person who doesn’t implement time blocking may often look somewhat chaotic, especially if they have a very long, continually extending to-do list. If you don’t have a clear plan of how to use up your time and which activities to focus on, you are prone to jump from one task to another rather unsystematically, in a reactive manner. As a consequence, you are bound to bear a high cost of context switching and risk your productivity tremendously.

Core Benefits of Time Blocking

Considering the nature and primary purposes of time blocking (i.e., avoidance of multitasking and promotion of focus), it fosters a significant increase in productivity. The reason for that is simple – the human mind cannot cope with “heavy-duty multitasking” very well, as the American Psychological Association notes. When we frequently switch from one task to another, our brains take a lot of time to readjust and regain concentration. By preventing task juggling, we eliminate the need to reactivate our mental resources again and again and, hence, become able to maintain performance efficiency at an optimal level.

Another important benefit of time blocking is an improved understanding of how you utilize your time. By minimizing the periods of unintentional “open-ended reactivity,” by intentionally keeping yourself away from responding to constantly emerging focus-killing messages and incoming calls during particular hours, you become able to track time spent on the planned tasks more accurately. Better time tracking, in turn, produces amazing advantages: from smarter resource management and more accurate task estimation to improved project outcomes and healthier work-life balance.

Besides, time blocking does the following:

It urges you to prioritize important and meaningful objectives,
It stimulates commitment to long-term goals,
It propels self-discipline and self-organization.

All this allows for staying on top of the game in whatever you do and helps you attain superior results faster.

Time Blocking Is Easy

To use time blocking and gain the benefits it offers, you won’t have to undertake any strenuous efforts. Just adopt a calendaring tool – digital apps and paper planners are equally good – and follow the steps described below:

1. Plan ahead

Time blocking is all about planning. To make this technique work to your advantage, you have to review tasks for an upcoming week / month on a regular basis. This will let you get a clearer picture of your workloads as a whole and enable you to create a rough plan for your weekly / monthly activities.

More importantly, you must evaluate your achievements and identify newly emerged to-dos at the end of each day to specify a schedule for tomorrow and make timely corrections in initial plans if needed. As a result, you’ll be able to control changes and risks more effectively and ensure that nothing prevents you from committing to your time blocking plan.

2. Prioritize tasks

Time blocking teaches us that we have a limited number of productive hours during the day and that our attention capacity is not endless. Thus, if there are dozens or even hundreds of tasks in your weekly agenda, you must learn to prioritize among them, discern high-impact tasks from lower-impact ones and choose what to concentrate on for a period at hand.

Strive to allocate the majority of your peak productivity hours – the time when you’re the most energetic and motivated – to work on something that’s especially important and meaningful to you. Less significant and recurring tasks that don’t require much attention, such as routine calls and staff meetings, can be blocked off for the rest of the day without any negative impacts on your performance efficiency.

3. Estimate time

How to block off the right number of hours for a task? Time estimation is the answer to this question. You need to evaluate how much time an individual piece of work may take and try to arrive at an as-accurate-as-possible estimate of resources required.

When you work on many projects and tasks of the same kind, analogous estimation is a great option to consider. The technique calls for the analysis of historical data on tasks / projects completed in the past as a means to estimate the amount of time needed to accomplish a new task / project with some similar goals and characteristics.

Analogous estimation can be effectively implemented with the help of a time tracking tool, such as actiTIME. We described how to use them both and get highly accurate time estimates in this blog post.

4. Commit to the schedule

When the final version of your time blocking schedule is ready, do everything needed to live by it. Align your usual daily routines and behaviors with your plan and do your best to eliminate all the factors that could distract you during specific hours of the day. It means you should prepare your work environment in advance and make certain nothing and nobody will disturb you while you’re focusing on work. Otherwise, what’s the point in designing a schedule that is difficult or impossible to adhere to?

5. Evaluate!

The last step is to evaluate your performance results:

Were you successful in following your time blocking schedule?
Have you found any estimation and planning mistakes?
Did time blocking help you fulfill your objectives more quickly, if at all?

Be mindful of your new time management experience. Gather performance and time tracking data on the way, and don’t forget to carry out a thorough analysis regularly. This is how you will identify the weak spots, generate ideas for improvement and, after a while, master the practice of time blocking to perfection.

Jira + actiTIME = The Best Time Tracking Combination

Elina Kukalo — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 07:43:20 +0000

Time tracking plays many vital roles in contemporary business management. It helps increase team productivity, maximize savings, hold employees accountable, and more. Project managers also use time tracking to monitor task progress and avoid schedule overruns. For this reason, it is an indispensable feature in many project management software products.

Jira is not an exception. This top-notch project management tool is highly esteemed by businesses of all sorts since it enables them to run projects effectively from the very start to the end and, meanwhile, achieve excellent performance outcomes. Jira incorporates time tracking functionality. Besides, it supports the integration with actiTIME, which allows for exceptional progress tracking experience and performance control.

In this piece, I’ll discuss how to track time in Jira with actiTIME and which advantages this method has over other approaches.

How Do You Track Time in Jira?

If you’re not familiar with Jira and want to learn more about this tool, check out this article – there, I described its main features and purposes in some detail. But for now, I will focus on Jira’s time tracking functionality that can be applied to practice in three ways:

Native time tracker – Jira has a manual-entry hour tracking feature that lets users record time spent on work and observe compliance with original task estimates.
App integrations – It is possible to find hundreds of interesting apps and plug-ins at Atlassian Marketplace. They can be integrated with Jira, as well as many other Atlassian products.
Chrome extensions – Plenty of time tracking solutions offer access through Chrome extensions while also supporting the integration with Jira. And if you’re already using a time tracking app, there’s a high chance that it does so too.

Each of these methods has its advantages, yet time tracking with actiTIME Chrome extension can provide you with far and away more holistic experience and accurate results than other approaches.

Let’s briefly explore why.

Why Is Time Tracking with actiTIME Better?

actiTIME is a high-quality piece of timesheet software with a plethora of handy features for:

Productivity analysis and improvement;
Adoption of more streamlined work processes (e.g., invoicing, payroll, PTO accrual, etc.);
Efficient scope and task management, and much more.

As for the core feature of actiTIME – time tracking – it’s particularly good for project progress monitoring, billable hours capturing and identification of behavior inefficiencies. Hours can be tracked only manually in the desktop version of actiTIME, but the Chrome extension – actiTIME Timer – allows for doing that automatically.

Automatic time tracking produces some superior benefits compared to the manual-entry mode. It lets you:

Obtain more accurate and honest time tracking data,
Free up to several hours a week that would otherwise be used to fill in timesheets,
Work productively on primary project tasks without distractions on manual time tracking.

If you’re worried that your employees don’t fill out their timesheets correctly and that your business suffers due to the loss of billable hours because of this, automatic time tracking and actiTIME Timer are an effective solution to your problem. The tool will also help if you’re not very good at tracking hours on your own and keep forgetting when exactly you’ve commenced working on tasks – actiTIME Timer will make precise records for you, providing a truthful summary of your time use behaviors.

How to Track Time in Jira with actiTIME

The process of time tracking with Jira-actiTIME integration is very simple. Just follow these four steps to set it up:

1. Install the extension

actiTIME Timer is available for download on this page. You may also locate it in the Chrome web store directly. Please note that if you don’t have an actiTIME account, you will have to create one – time entries made with the timer need a place to be stored, and the timesheet in your account will become that place.

2. Configure the extension to sync data

For the timer to work properly, you need to integrate Jira and actiTIME.

Firstly, connect the extension with your actiTIME account by clicking on the timer button in Chrome toolbar:

Secondly, open the timer’s settings and integrate it with Jira. Insert the custom domain address in the designated field and select the right app:

After this, the actiTIME Timer button will pop up in your Jira account and will (almost) be ready for use.

3. Create tasks you want to track time for

Before starting to track progress and time, there should be something to work on. Thus, you need to create projects and tasks both in Jira and actiTIME.

The way to do so in Jira is as follows: Projects 🡪 Create project 🡪 Choose project type 🡪 Enter a project name 🡪 Create. Once done, you will be able to add as many tasks / issues / stories to the new project as you wish.

Task creation in actiTIME is no less easy:

Open the Tasks interface,
Click on the + Add New button,
Choose + New Project,
Fill in the empty fields and add the necessary number of tasks.

Voilà! You’ve got the new project and tasks ready to be tracked.

4. Track it!

To commence tracking hours for any Jira task with actiTIME, you need to locate it in the Issues interface and click on the Start Timer button:

After that, the only thing left is choosing the data sync option. Click on the short-cut name of your Jira task (e.g., <Task for AR-3> like in the example below) and select an actiTIME task that will be synchronized with the new time entry:

When this step is completed, every time entry made with actiTIME Timer in Jira will be safely submitted to your actiTIME timesheet. There, you may review and edit it manually at any moment.

In Conclusion

With actiTIME, you will significantly improve the accuracy of Jira time tracking. Moreover, you’ll gain access to comprehensive time reports and will be able to analyze both the productivity trends in your team and the financial performance of your projects in depth.

Story Points vs. Hours: What Estimation Type Is Better?

Elina Kukalo — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 15:33:21 +0000

Time estimation is at the basis of adequate project planning and successful project delivery. Therefore, managers and their teams are under high pressure to develop as accurate estimates as possible. They spend much time trying to figure out how long it would take to complete tasks without delays and usually come up with a fixed value in hours, days or months.

Nevertheless, hours are not the only possible format to calculate and present project estimates. An increasingly popular alternative to traditional time estimation, story point estimation, doesn’t focus on the probable duration of the project at all. Instead, it helps evaluate the extent of effort the task or the project requires.

This technique has a plethora of advantages over the man-hour estimation methods, and we’ve described them in this article along with the process of story point estimation.

Read on to learn more!

What Is Story Point Estimation?

Story point estimation is commonly used in Agile projects that are all about flexibility, continual learning and collaboration. It serves to evaluate the amount of effort required to complete a single piece of work or an item from a product backlog: anything from the development of new features to bug fixing and massive product changes.

Story point estimation aims to assign a specific numeric value (story point) to every selected item based on its size, complexity and number of risks involved in the implementation process. Note that RELATIVE VALUES AND RATIOS ARE MORE SIGNIFICANT THAN RAW FIGURES – it’s not so essential that a piece of work receives 2 story points and another one gets 4. What’s important here is that the item assigned with the value of 4 requires twice as much effort than the one rated as 2.

In other words, when using story point estimation, you COMPARE VALUES TO PREDICT THE OVERALL VOLUME OF EFFORT for a separate task or the project as a whole. Hence, unlike traditional hour-based methods, this technique doesn’t really set any time limit for the estimated piece of work right away.

However, deadlines play a vital role in project management, and you can select a time range that every story point would represent. For instance, the value of 1 may equate to 4-6 hours. The value of 3 may call for 7-10 hours, the value of 5 – for 12 hours, etc. The timeframe in each case will depend on your team composition and specifics, which require careful examination and analysis as well.

The Process of Story Point Estimation

Story point estimation can be a bit confusing at first for those who have never dealt with it before. To clarify the concept, let’s take a look at the main steps included in the story point estimation process in some detail:

Step 1: Choose an estimation matrix

Simply put, an estimation matrix is a numeric scale that you’ll use to evaluate the selected pieces of work. It can be a straightforward linear scale (… 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 …) or, preferably, the Fibonacci sequence (…5, 8, 13, 21, 34 …). The reason for applying the latter is simple: the gaps between numbers in this series are more extensive than in the linear scale, which makes it easier to contrast the difference between the values assigned to separate tasks at hand.

Step 2: Identify user stories or other relevant items for estimation

At this phase, you simply need to determine what your project will target to accomplish: develop a new innovative tool, enhance the functionality of your software, improve internal process infrastructure, etc.

Note: It is recommended to format backlog items and project tasks that you plan to estimate as user stories – the descriptions of product features from end-users’ points of view (considering their wants, needs and preferences). By writing a user story, you may learn more about consumers’ quality expectations, conditions of satisfaction (such as price and utility), intentions behind purchasing whatever you plan to create, etc. These things are essential to consider since they’ll define what you’re going to do in your project to a significant extent and, thus, will largely determine the final estimate.

Step 3: Select reference points

Historical data provides valuable evidence to achieve more accurate and credible estimation results. Besides, it’s more convenient to estimate tasks when you have data to compare them with. For this reason, if you’ve completed a similar project somewhere in the past, you can utilize the collected information on its performance to develop new estimates.

Step 4: Identify the risks, size and complexity of the selected estimation item(s)

The volume of effort required for project completion depends on the quantity of tasks it comprises, their complexity, as well as the number of risks and uncertainties that the team may encounter on the way. Therefore, at this step, you have to:

Identify the size of the selected user story by calculating how many tasks and sub-tasks should be performed during its implementation.
Assess the complexity of tasks. (Writing 100 standard two-sentence messages isn’t the same as creating 10 pieces of full-length technical descriptions. Though the latter contains fewer sub-tasks than the former, it will most probably take much more effort to complete.)
Detect as many risks and uncertainties as possible. Do you have any gaps in knowledge about client expectations? Will a delay in supplies, increased employee turnover or bad weather severely impact your process? All the relevant risks and uncertainties must be reflected in your estimate for more accurate results.

Step 5: Discuss and estimate

Once the above step is passed, it’s time to rate each piece of work under consideration based on its size, complexity and associated risks.

Story point estimation is usually carried through team discussion and, often, by using a gamified estimation technique known as Planning Poker or Scrum Poker.

Long story short, at such an estimation meeting:

Everyone gets familiar with the selected user story and project objectives.
Team members anonymously estimate that story’s size, complexity and risks (i.e., their probability and impact), providing an estimate for each of these aspects separately.
Then, each participant presents initial point values and, if they match – the number becomes the final estimate.
If they don’t match, estimators should explain their choices and, after the discussion, estimation is repeated until the consensus is achieved.
Afterward, the final point values for the story’s size, complexity and risks are summed up to get the total estimate.

Extra Step 6: Set up deadlines

After the final story point estimate is agreed on, it’s possible to predict how much time the work on the estimated user story will ultimately take by determining how fast each employee is capable of accomplishing a single story point.

For example, a task receives the total value of 100 story points. An experienced team member will complete 1 story point in 2 hours, and a less experienced one – in 3 hours. Thus, if responsibilities for the task are equally divided between these two employees, the estimate can be converted into hours as follows:

50 SP x 2 hours + 50 SP x 3 hours = 250 hours

Knowing this figure, you can easily determine the deadline for the task.

Advantages (and One Disadvantage)

Story point estimation may seem more complicated than traditional hour-based estimation techniques. But is that really the case?

The technique can surely be time-consuming and calls for some skills and experience, which we may see as its primary disadvantage. However, when implementing such hour-based estimation methods as 3-point estimation or Delphi, one also must commit quite a lot of time and effort to analyze project specifics, create detailed work breakdowns and discuss estimation results at expert meetings. Hence, the thing that makes story point estimation look so difficult is its unfamiliarity. Once you grasp the concept, it seems less scary and much more feasible.

Along with that, story point estimation has many apparent advantages over many hour-based estimation techniques:

Story point estimates are accurate. The method offers a holistic system for the evaluation of core factors contributing to work duration, including risks and complexity. In contrast, most of the traditional hour-based estimation methods only look at the amount of task and don’t encourage estimators to take into account worst-case scenarios.
The technique is employee-friendly. Man-hour estimation often produces a sort of inferiority complex: if you fail to meet the estimate, it’s a sign that you’re not competent and skilled enough; but if you complete the planned work earlier, it means the forecast was wrong. As for story point estimation, by focusing on the volume of effort instead of task duration, it doesn’t push workers to meet the deadline at any cost. It implies that a timeline is a relative feature and may vary depending on your team members’ speed of performance (which might change once in a while).
It encourages flexibility. Every team – especially an agile one – aims to be as quick and efficient in work as possible. However, if employees commence struggling and their performance slows down for some reason, this downward change in speed doesn’t affect the story point estimate at all. That is to say, you might need to recalculate the deadline in such a case, but not the story point estimate itself. In contrast, man-hour techniques produce very fixed time-bound forecasts, and when something goes wrong, you normally have to recalculate them entirely.
Story point estimation is collaborative in nature. It eliminates the risk of biasing due to estimators’ subjective perceptions, lack of knowledge or attention. When many competent team members are involved in the estimation process, results tend to be more objective and trustworthy.
The technique doesn’t have to be carried out by task performers. Even those who won’t be doing the actual job themselves but have a good understanding of the field and project requirements can easily produce accurate and objective story point estimates.

Conclusion

Overall, story point estimation enables teams to precisely determine the volume of effort associated with any piece of work. With a forecast like this, you can organize the processes, organizational culture and environment in a way that allows attaining objectives more efficiently.

To use this technique properly, you might need to spend some time learning and practicing. However, the attempt is surely worthwhile – with the aid of story point estimation, you’ll gain a chance to get more accurate and less rigid estimates and rethink your approach to project management for the benefit of your team members and the business as a whole.

10 Steps to Efficient Time Tracking in a Software Company

Elina Kukalo — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 11:15:31 +0000

“TIME IS MONEY”

As beaten as this phrase is, its truth is undeniable in the software industry, where the success of a project largely deneds on the speed of its realization and the ability of the team to preven schedule delays.

Besides, when a software company works for clients and charges them per hour of service, it has a compelling need to keep a record of billable time carefully and precisely. Guesswork isn’t a great option in this case, and forgetfulness may actually result in loss of revenues.

For this reason, efficient time tracking is so crucial for developers, programmers and other software professionals, regardless of whether they do their job independently or a part of a large team. And in this article, we will explain how to set up a well-functioning time tracking routine for your software business.

1. Use a Smart Time Tracking Tool

Digital time trackers have several significant advantages over paper-and-pencil instruments or Excel spreadsheets:

They process time tracking data quickly and infallibly, saving much time for you;
They visualize performance statistics in graphs and charts, making it easier to analyze team productivity and progress;
They include many additional features that allow for a more streamlined work process in general;
Plus, many digital and web-based tools can track hours automatically, which increases precision and eliminates errors in data collection.

Manual-entry software and automatic timers are equally good. In case you want to boost productivity and need a thorough summary of your time use behaviors, an automatic time tracker, such as actiTIME Timer, will work best for you. If you just need to comply with overtime regulations or collect data for project estimation, invoicing and payroll accrual, a manual-entry tool will serve you well enough. In other words, the choice of a particular type of software depends only on your needs.

2. Track Both Billable and Non-billable Tasks

The reason for tracking billable time is obvious – it helps to figure an accurate price for the development and programming services you render and make sure that no loss in profit is taking place.

As for the tracking on non-billable time, it allows for determining the real cost of projects. You may charge clients merely for software development, but you also do research, engage in brainstorming, communicate with stakeholders and analyze project results upon completion. Though these tasks are non-billable, they take time and, thus, incur expenses. When tracking them as diligently as billable tasks, you develop a more realistic picture of project profitability.

3. Focus on Simplicity

It’s great when a time tracker is sophisticated enough and has plenty of advanced and helpful features. However, the simplicity of use is a priority in case you’ve just started to explore how time tracking works or plan to integrate a new piece of software into the workflow of a relatively large team with a small number of tech-savvy employees.

Resistance to change may occur even due to an insignificant innovation or transformation. To minimize risks, choose a user-friendly tool that won’t be difficult to adopt, such as actiTIME. Later on, if you decide that more complex software functionality is needed for better business outcomes, you may expand it with various add-ons and integrations or switch to an entirely new product.

4. Explain Why Time Tracking Is Important

Continuing with the issue of resistance to change, people are generally reluctant to alter their behaviors when they don’t perceive any direct advantage in doing so. Therefore, it’s pivotal to discuss with your team members why time tracking is good for everyone.

If developers in your team are paid per hour, it won’t be hard to convince them in the value of time tracking since, basically, the size of their wage depends on the accuracy of daily timesheet entries. But if you or your team members have fixed salaries, it will be helpful to focus on long-term benefits of time tracking:

Increased productivity,
More streamlined and less time-consuming billing process,
Better management of expenses, etc.

Be sure to communicate these and other values of time tracking to your team, and don’t forget to align them with employees’ personal interests for stronger motivation.

5. Don’t Use Time Tracking Data for Employee Criticism

Another reason why your team members may resist the adoption of a time tracker is the fear that the tool could be used to criticize their performance and control their behaviors. With many software products offering a GPS tracking feature and taking screenshots of users’ workstations once in a while, such a fear is reasonable indeed. However, even the most simple of time trackers can be abused by managers in an attempt to evaluate the quality of employees’ work.

TRY TO AVOID THAT BY ALL MEANS. Don’t rely too heavily on time tracking statistics when appraising your team members – there are many more factors defining the quality of developers’ performance than the amount of time spent on tasks.

Note that if you are going to apply time tracking for employee appraisal after all, the accuracy of data may suffer severely since your employees will be more likely to engage in timesheet cheating in order to protect themselves from manager disapproval. Therefore, utilize a time tracker only to assess the overall project and business performance rather than the work of individual employees. In this way, you’ll help not only your team members but also yourself.

6. Track Work Hours Daily

By Friday night, the majority of us are incapable of recalling how much time was spent on tasks throughout a week. Therefore, if you fill timesheets weekly or even rarer, your time tracking data is prone to be highly imprecise and full of errors.

In contrast, even manual time tracking can free you of guesswork and the toils of recollection when performed daily. And if you record the number of hours spent on a task right after the work is completed, the accuracy of time tracking data increases multifold. It’s not necessary to be a perfectionist and track working time up to every single second, but the more precise your time entries are – the more benefits you and your business gain.

7. Establish Organization-Wide Time Tracking Rules

Policies and standards keep organizational processes in order and make sure that no essential piece of information is lost. Thus, consider developing organization-wide time tracking guidelines.

Don’t forget to state the desired frequency of timesheet completion in this document and take into account the following:

Which basic time entry requirements will your developers have to adhere to?
Who will supervise the time tracking process, and how often will they check colleagues’ timesheets?
How frequently will the filled timesheets get locked to prevent changes?
Will your team members have to add comments and notes to their time entries and on which occasions?
Will there be a specific system for project / task creation, naming and categorization?

Besides, add some tips and explain the best practices in this guide to help your employees integrate time tracking into their daily routine faster.

8. Find Someone to Check on Timesheet Completion

To ensure that time tracking is implemented properly and produces maximum positive results, it would help to have someone on your team to check others’ timesheets regularly, especially at the initial stages of practice adoption.

If you think that such a role is rather unnecessary, try to find and employ a time tracker that can be configured to remind users to fill in timesheets by the end of each workday. actiTIME is a good example of such a tool – it lets you set up preferable notification rules, customize message contents and choose when and how often users will receive their reminders.

9. Track Progress Against Deadlines and Estimates

Time estimation serves significant purposes. It helps managers prevent cost overruns and utilize human and time resources in an optimal way. Thus, when you track time against project estimates and deadlines, you become able to control labor expenses better and see how efficient your employees are at work. In other words, estimates can be used as one of the key performance criteria – if you’re not successful enough in adhering to them, some changes in your management practices and decisions must take place.

By the way, actiTIME can be implemented to develop very accurate time estimates for your development and programming projects. We thoroughly described the way you can utilize time tracking data and the tool’s functionality for this aim here. Feel free to check it out if you could use some help when estimating tasks.

10. Analyze Time Tracking Data Purposefully

The ultimate value of digital time trackers is in their data reporting features. These tools easily process all the information submitted by users and then present it to you in a readable and visually appealing format – in diagrams, tables, graphs, etc.

In actiTIME, for instance, you can overview personal time use trends in a beautifully designed chart or run detailed reports on team performance, project costs and revenues. Your only job is to closely examine these time tracking reports and apply them to find answers to the questions that bother you most:

How long is it taking to complete a project and why?
How much should we charge our clients to remain profitable?
How much did my team members or I earn?
How profitable is our new project?
How accurate are our task estimates, etc.?

Create a list of questions to drive the process of data analysis and enjoy the enhanced performance results once the issues are tackled.

The Role of Time Estimation in Project Management

Elina Kukalo — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 18:36:32 +0000

What is time?

An irreversible sequence of events, a linear flux of interconnected instances or an intangible substance measured by clocks? Throughout human history, philosophers, scientists and creatives have tried to answer this question, but the concept of time is still open to interpretation.

One thing is certain: time rules over our lives. It dictates how we approach our daily pursuits, plan events and act on various goals. Although such a fact of reality may be imperceptible for some, every experienced project manager is well aware of it.

Time is among the central elements in the Project Management Triangle, also known as the Triple Constraint Model, which suggests that for bringing any project to successful closure and achieving formulated objectives, it is vital to have a realistic and thought-through picture of:

Project expenses and income (Budget),
Operations and activities required to meet desired objectives (Scope),
Deadlines and timeframes for every project task (Time).

Simply put, time planning provides background for effective project realization, and the practice of estimation is at its very core since time estimates drive schedule design and give structure to numerous work processes.

With this in mind, in the present article, we will explore the notion of time estimation and investigate its role in project management.

Definition of Time Estimation

The term “time estimation” refers to the assessment of the number of hours needed to complete a task or a series of tasks. The deeper your understanding of work specifics and nuances is, the more accurate time estimates you can receive. Therefore, to evaluate the volume of time for a project as a whole, you should do the following:

Identify the amount of work – develop a detailed work breakdown structure and create a list of tasks for achieving significant project milestones and deliverables;
Assess how many hours, days or weeks each of the project activities may take and sum up individual estimates to get the grand total of time necessary to complete the project.

As you can see, time estimation is an integral part of initial project planning, and, along with other planning practices, it serves to:

Set realistic project expectations,
Foresee risks,
Organize processes,
And promote a focus on priorities from the very start.

Spheres of Application

Two fields where time estimation is commonly applied are:

Software development,
And all sorts of construction projects, beginning with the erection of buildings and ending with large-scale infrastructure changes.

Nevertheless, time estimation can be of help across a variety of industries and sectors of performance, especially those using a project-based approach to business or, in other words, those that regularly initiate carefully designed, timebound and usually collaborative undertakings in order to attain specific aims.

Time estimation can be useful even beyond our jobs since one can implement it to set deadlines for personal projects and self-improvement endeavors. So, if you wish to accomplish something outside of your regular professional environment – be that an educational level-up or any other type of work towards a goal with measurable outputs – time estimates can become a thing to give you a long-awaited push to proceed in the right direction. What they do is show us that, with a little bit of discipline and a good action plan, all the conceived targets are achievable.

Why Are Accurate Time Estimates Crucial for Project Success?

The PMI’s Pulse of the Profession study of 2017, which involved over 3,200 project management professionals, indicated that only about 50% of projects were completed on time that year.

The same study conducted in 2018 revealed that, among 5,402 of the surveyed international specialists, 25% viewed inadequate time estimation as a primary cause of recent project failures in their organizations.

Additionally, the results of a somewhat older analysis by Gartner showed that schedule overruns contributed to failures in large IT projects with budgets of more than a million USD in 28% of cases.

Of course, inefficient time estimation doesn’t necessarily result in complete project failure at once. As for schedule delays, there are a plethora of other variables to consider:

It is always challenging to determine deadlines and stick to them in massive and complex projects;
Sometimes delays may happen due to third parties’ actions or environmental factors that are out of your direct control;
In other situations, they may be an outcome of unforeseen changes in project scope (i.e., scope creep) and poor initial project plans.

Nevertheless, the provided statistics demonstrate that inadequate time estimation increases the risks for project underperformance and unsatisfactory outcomes.

Here are two main reasons why you should dedicate a lot of attention and efforts to arrive at as precise time estimates as possible:

Cost overruns

The Triple Constraint Model prompts that a project’s scope, deadline and budget are closely interrelated, and changes in one of these parameters inevitably cause changes in the others. While the amount of project tasks conditions the duration of a project, time estimates and schedules may define its overall price to a large extent (especially when a portion of project costs is calculated depending on workers’ hourly rates).

In this way, inadequate time estimation can interfere with your capability to create sound budgets and get credible cost forecasts. As a consequence, you may experience cost overruns, and the bigger they grow, the harder it is to cope with them. That is to say, cost overruns often result in financial loss and inability to complete projects on time (if at all) because of the scarcity of resources.

Impaired managerial credibility and negative stakeholder perceptions

Time and cost estimates serve as performance objectives, and every manager has a responsibility to meet them. Also, estimates announced prior to starting the actual work on a project form stakeholder expectations. Based on them, not only you but your partners make assumptions regarding the quality, functionality and duration of projects and plan their own operations in accordance with those assumptions.

Besides, along with costs and budgets, time estimates frequently determine the attractiveness of newly planned projects to sponsors for reasonable deadlines imply that a project is feasible to realize. Sponsors have a considerable stake in projects and bear the highest level of accountability for their outcomes. Thus, if estimates showcased during the bidding process turn out to be wrong at the later stages in the project life cycle, sponsors become the first ones to trial all the harmful effects of that mistake.

The main takeaway from the above is that time estimation errors – especially when they severely impact the performance of your own team, as well as plans, operations and activities of essential stakeholders – may degrade your credibility as a manager and be perceived as a sign of professional weakness by others. In the end, such errors can take a toll on your sense of managerial self-efficacy and relationships with different parties involved in project realization.

In Conclusion

Time estimation plays a particularly important role in the process of project planning. It protects against delays that may lead to cost overruns and negative stakeholder perceptions, threatening the very ability to complete a project in the long run.

To avoid that, dedicate enough resources to administer time estimation the right way and obtain all the data needed to make forecasts as accurate as possible, namely:

A work breakdown structure and information on project scope;
Analysis of external risks that may interfere with the timely delivery of desired outputs;
Analysis of internal risks, including potentially inaccurate budget estimates and their possible effects on project schedule.

The keys to correct time estimation are the use of hard evidence, avoidance of overly optimistic presumptions and consideration of uncertainties. Paying enough attention to all the three of them, you have a higher chance of preventing delays and attaining desired project goals.

Best Ways to Track Time in Jira

Elina Kukalo — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 11:44:12 +0000

Project management software plays a huge role in the majority of companies’ work process, and while project management products are many, Jira remains among the most popular ones.

Jira was originally designed in 2002 as an issue tracking tool for software developers. However, it has drastically evolved over the years and turned into a platform that easily meets a varying set of management needs in highly diverse teams and professional spheres.

Today’s Jira comprises functionality for:

Project planning,
Progress monitoring,
Performance analysis,
And team collaboration.

Besides, it allows for the integration with a plethora of other useful apps and Chrome extensions, including smart automatic time trackers like actiTIME.

Since Jira’s native time tracking feature supports only manual entry, such integration has multiple advantages. Automatic time trackers let users record hours spent on various tasks more accurately and provide a more realistic insight into the team’s time management behaviors. With their assistance, you can enhance your project management experience and boost team productivity in the long term.

In this article, we will discuss different ways to track time in Jira, the benefits of the practice and how to perform it. But first, let’s talk a little about Jira itself, the main functionality of the tool and some perks it offers.

What Is Jira?

As a project management platform, Jira comes in two primary versions:

Jira Software – Like the original Jira 1.0, this product is created primarily for the use of software development teams (and especially agile ones) but includes an extended list of valuable features for running projects across their life cycle: planning, tracking, release management and reporting.
Jira Core – This tool serves the very same project management purposes like Jira Software but is intended for teams across diverse spheres of performance: marketing, HR, finance and many more. Jira Core incorporates features for workflow planning, task management, progress monitoring and performance analysis – everything required for successful project completion.

Jira Templates

To commence task management and team collaboration in any of the above products, you first need to design a project with one of the in-built Jira templates:

Scrum (Jira Software) – With this template for agile project management, you can plan sprints, create backlogs, visualize task progress on the Scrum board and communicate on to-dos through comments. If your team adheres to the Scrum methodology and undertakes a highly flexible, collaborative approach to work, then this template will be a perfect fit for you.

Kanban (Jira Software) – Another Jira template for agile teams provides a straightforward visual overview of all the planned project activities and progress in their completion on the Kanban board. It allows for more efficient workload management, task prioritization and performance monitoring.

Classic Business Project (Jira Core) – Jira has a series of templates for varied management processes (e.g., document approval and task tracking), as well as different organizational units and their activities (e.g., content management, recruitment, procurement, etc.). These templates are designed considering the unique needs and characteristics of diverse teams and the areas of their performance. Therefore, you won’t have to customize templates and design workflows from scratch. This will let you integrate Jira into daily work much quicker.

Time Tracking in Jira

Time tracking has a long history and was used even by ancient communities to accrue workers’ wages. Today, the practice serves the very same purpose, but, in addition, it plays a pivotal role in contemporary project management by helping managers to:

Keep track of current team progress,
Monitor project costs and revenues based on labor expenses and billable hours,
Obtain historical data for better planning and estimation of future projects.

In other words, time tracking allows managers to stay aware of almost every aspect of project performance and, hence, enables them to improve outcomes significantly.

There are three ways to track time in Jira:

1. Jira’s native time tracker

The primary purposes of Jira’s in-built time tracking feature are to show how many hours are spent on tasks and to ensure compliance with original time estimates.

To see it in practice:

Open Jira’s task settings by clicking on an item in the Board interface,
Indicate a time estimate for a task in hours or days (1d = 8h by default),
And make a time entry once you’ve stopped working on it.

After these three simple steps are completed, the time spent on the task and the time remaining will become available for review.

2. Time tracking through app integrations

As we have already mentioned, Jira supports integrations with plenty of other apps. To find one for yourself, simply click on the + Add apps button in the task settings interface and search through a list of instruments showcased at the Atlassian Marketplace.

You’ll see hundreds of free and fee-based apps for almost any need there. Some automatic time trackers and work logging tools are on display as well, and you have a chance to try them out at no cost during a trial period.

3. Time tracking with Chrome extensions

Another great way to track work hours in Jira is through a Chrome extension, and actiTIME is one of the best options available out there.

With actiTIME, you can track time spent on Jira issues and tasks automatically. Just click on the Start button and stop the counter whenever you’ve finished the work – all the data will be safely synced with your actiTIME account.

In this way, actiTIME will:

Rid you of all the troubles of manual time entry,
Enable you to track time without distractions from the main work process,
Increase the accuracy of time tracking in Jira multifold,
Deepen your insight into time management behaviors of your team with comprehensive statistics and reports.

By combining Jira and actiTIME, you can control your projects better, see how much time different tasks consume, educate yourself to make better workload distribution decisions, and more.