Thursday 4 December 2008

Time Recording and Wooden Dollars

Let’s look at a typical project in an agency / software house that has adopted time recording. During this project a number of things happen:
  • The developers are constantly pulled off the project to support legacy apps, attend company meetings, and tend to various admin tasks. Only the time they actually spend on the project is recorded on the timesheet. All other tasks are booked to non-project codes.
  • Its winter time and a lot of time is lost due to high absence and sickness levels within the team (snivel). Again, only the time they work on the project is booked to it.
  • There are performance issues with a developer, resulting in quality issues and slow delivery. The PM makes a case with the project office that it would be unfair to have all this developers time booked to the project as he hadn’t received “value for money”. The PM wins the case and not all of the time spent on the project is booked to it.
  • Part of the project (as sold by the sales team) involves a developer getting up to speed with a new piece of technology which is critical to the delivery of the project. It could be considered R&D. The PM instructs the developer not to book the time spent on this task to the project as its “Training” and should be booked to the general company training code.
The project is delivered late, BUT on paper the project is shown to have been delivered on budget and made a profit. The only problem is, in all of the cases above, the company is still absorbing costs so the fact that the time isn’t booked to the project means the project is dealing in wooden dollars. As this project is deemed to have been a financial success, this pattern is repeated on future projects. Scale this up to companies running many projects concurrently and this issue is hard to detect but massively amplified. Eventually, the company goes bust. A list of specific companies this has happened to and the evidence to back it up is available upon request.

Time recording is a necessary evil in most software houses or agencies. A public sector client of mine is currently debating the need to introduce a time recording system to help with managing 60+ concurrent projects. I’ve come across the time recording debate many times and there isn’t a simple answer to whether you should or shouldn’t do time recording. The key thing to understand and be clear on is your purpose for introducing time recording to your organisation. Here are some reasons for doing time recording that I've heard some organisations use:
  • We want a way to quantify and record the amount of effort that goes into a specific task so we can improve future estimates. (excellent)
  • We want to accurately measure the P&L of individual projects. (difficult)
  • We want to use time recording to track progress. (valid but a very poor way to measure progress)
  • We need time recording to maximise staff utilisation. (very, VERY bad. See below)
  • We bill our clients on a time and materials basis so the time we enter goes straight into an invoice for the client. (good work if you can get it)
  • Time recording will assist us with resource planning. (possible, but better tools available to do this)
Introducing time recording to your organisation will have a huge cultural impact. Below I’ve listed some of the good and bad points about time recording that should help you in forming a judgement on whether it’s right for your organisation:

Bad

- You have to police it resulting in staff feeling a squeeze from two different angles:
  • PM’s police what time is booked to their projects and fight like mad to stop time being booked to protect the budget. They have become very creative in their methods!
  • Line managers want to maximise the amount of billable time (wooden dollars) booked to projects and resist time being booked to non-project codes such as Training, Admin, Induction, Team Briefings, etc. (see utilisation below)
- Line managers waste a lot of time chasing individuals to fill in their timesheets that could be better utilised elsewhere.

- It requires a lot of discipline from staff to update their timesheet daily. Daily updates keep the data more accurate and timely. If you have staff updating timesheets weekly then it’s highly unlikely that the data will be accurate.

- You may end up employing someone just to manage and police the time recording system.
Burden – time recording introduces a huge burden to your organisation and those who work within that environment. Any additional burden kills morale. If you constantly hound staff to complete timesheets then you will destroy their morale.

- If there’s a lot of resistance to time recording you may find some staff purposely incorrectly book time to undermine the validity of the system.

- Inaccurate filing and recording of time:
  • Some time recording systems I’ve seen don’t allow you to enter more than 37.5hrs per week. So how do you record overtime? This is a great way for some unscrupulous project managers to hide project overruns.
  • I’ve seen PM’s entering time on behalf of their team and miraculously making the figures fit.
  • Most people just make the time fit into what they feel are appropriate allocations they can get away with. They try booking it all to projects before having to justify why they’ve booked it to non-project codes.
I’ve even come across PM’s who have stopped people from working on their project because “we don’t have the budget for you”. In these specific cases, the people offering help had no other work to do and could add real value. The real cost to the organisation would be the same as they’re paying for them anyway. The project would have been delivered earlier. The only cost to the project would have been in wooden dollars as the time recording system would report the project being over budget after they had recorded their time against it.

- Many KPIs (e.g. utilisation) within organisations are calculated using data from time recording systems. Given all of the above, this results in management decisions being made on wildly inaccurate data.

Good
  • Split charging of time for shared resources. If a developer is pulled of your project to resolve a support issue for a previous project then it’s useful to bill the time accordingly.
  • Time recording can help in measuring how long specific tasks take when used in the context of historical analysis and estimation of future work.
  • Time recording, if used correctly, has the potential to separate effort from schedule (requires a lot of discipline). In other words, if a task took 4 hours of effort but the elapsed time was 2 days then both of these metrics are valuable. This difference between effort and schedule is extremely common and yet rarely recorded. The elapsed time is usually recorded which means the project accounts for team meetings, sickness, or any other issues not normally accounted for in project estimates.
  • Time recording generates data. Data is great for producing lots of reports and pretty looking management dashboards.
  • It’s very easy to measure staff utilisation with a time recording system…..or so it seems.

Utilisation

Most managers are trained and actively encouraged to maximise the utilisation of their staff. It makes sense right, as you don’t want staff sat around with nothing to do? It makes perfect sense that the more value we extract from our staff maximises the bottom line? Managers are often given a big fat pat on the back for reaching company utilisation targets, regularly in excess of 70%. Something that seems so obviously good actually has the direct opposite effect.

Maximising utilisation is bad. Just in case you didn’t get that, MAXIMISING UTILISATION IS VERY BAD.

To survive and be profitable in a software house the key is throughput. The more software you can get out of the door the more you can invoice clients. This is particularly relevant to fixed price contracts. I’ve come across very few outsourced software development projects charged on a T&M basis. The more you maximise utilisation the less chance you’ll have of having the right resource available when you need it. This incurs delays to the project or additional costs in bringing in contract staff or freelancers to cover. Many agencies in this situation experience the ripple effect where they start to borrow resources from other projects to get a project closed and invoiced. This cascades through all other projects. I’m not saying you should over resource so you can throw more bodies at a project, what I’m saying is you should over resource so you can improve your chances of having the right people available at the right time.

Maximising utilisation impacts heavily on staff morale. Staff feel pressured to book all time to projects and not to morale boosting activities such as personal development, training, team meetings, etc. It stifles creativity, communication, and innovation.

There’s an excellent book called Slack which covers the subject of utilisation in much more detail. The analogies it provides, which I quote far too often are:
  • If you run a motorway network at 100% - you get traffic jams
  • If you run a network connection at 100% utilisation – everything slows down
  • If you maximise utilisation within your agency – you print less invoices and go bust! (ok, this last quote is mine)

I’m sure there are many project accountants out there who may pick fault with what I’ve written here and quote various accounting theories and approaches. I genuinely welcome their comment along with others as this has proven to be a highly contentious issue within organisations. Feel free to comment.

Tuesday 3 June 2008

Software Development Resources

I finally got around to pulling together many of the documents, templates, and tools I use on a regular basis into a static resource page. You can view this list of resources by clicking the following link:

Software Development Resources Page

I've got a lot more to add over the coming weeks but hopefully this will be a big enough list to be useful.

Monday 31 March 2008

Flow Time

ok, so Flow Time isn't a new concept. It's been around for a very long time now. First published in 1987, Peopleware by Timothy Lister & Tom DeMarco completely changed my approach to managing software developers.

Yet, Flow Time does seem to be a new concept to many development managers I speak to (and hence the reason for this post). As soon as I tell them what Flow Time is they instantly get it. It's not a difficult concept to grasp and most of them admit to interrupting developer Flow Time regularly.

If you take a look around your development team - probably located in an open plan office - count how many of them are wearing headphones. A large percentage no doubt. What they're doing is getting into Flow Time.

So if you still don't know what Flow Time is it's really simple. Have you ever been happily coding away only to realise that you've completely forgotten about the passage of time and it's now way later than you thought? Congratulations, you've experienced Flow Time. In Peopleware, the authors say it takes a minimum of 15 minutes to get into a Flow but takes seconds to come out of it.

This means that every time you as a manager stops by a developers desk to "get a progress update", or anyone else telephones, emails, or interrupts them in any way, you're actually knocking the hell out of productivity. For every interruption it'll take them at least 15 minutes to get back to being productive.

As a development manager I tell all of my developers to respect the Flow Time of others, i.e. if the headphones are on, do not disturb. I keep all team and project meetings to the beginning or end of the day. I encourage my team to check their emails at times to maximise Flow Time, i.e. beginning/middle/end of day. I tell them it's ok to turn on voicemail and respond at the end of the day. I also don't agree with hunt groups on phone systems or developers being interrupted to pickup someone else's phone.

Go and buy a copy of Peopleware and when you've read it, sit back and observe your development team for a short period of time. I can guarantee you will make changes.

Sunday 13 January 2008

Home-shoring, Near-shoring, and Off-shoring - tips for technical leads with distributed development teams

First of all, a bit of definition - I define home-shoring as developers who are probably freelancers working from home as part of a geographically distributed team. Near-shoring is developers who are within a couple of hours of your timezone, and off-shoring is developers who are further afield. This blog post is NOT about Outsourcing.

I've been managing and delivering software projects successfully using distributed teams for 5 years now. I've managed distributed teams from UK, Romania, North India (Deli), South India (Trevandum), and China (Beijing) on various types and sizes of projects. On the flip-side, I've been a developer in distributed teams on several projects, working remotely from my home in the UK and one project in particular where it was being run from Spain. With this experience I offer the following tips to other technical leads who may already be working with, or considering working with distributed teams from home or abroad.
  • Make sure all team members can contact each other at all times. As a manager I insist all team members appear online and can be contacted instantly via VOIP. Very invasive yes, but I can walk up to team members if they're based in my office location so it shouldn't be any different for remote workers.
  • Use Skype or an Instant Messenger application to see when other team members are online. Verbal communication is very important, don't let language barriers stop you from speaking.
  • It's very unwise (or even suicidal) to attempt a project using a distributed team without adequate source control. One other tip whilst on the subject of source control - locate the source repository closer to the physical location of the majority of developers. I saw a company once with the source repository in the UK but all their developers were in India?!
  • Use continuous integration - along with automated testing as much as possible. Ensure all developers are on the email list for when the build breaks.
  • Ensure all developers check in code regularly.
  • Invest some time at project inception on training all the team on how to work together effectively. Show them the desktop sharing tools, show them how to use Skype properly, make sure they understand the source control system and the automated build. You can do this easily using Webex or other conferencing / collaboration tools.
  • If you can, realign the working hours of the developers to synchronise the timezones. In other words, get the on-shore team to work early's and the off-shore team to work lates. It's important to maximise the amount of true collaborative working time to ease communication.
  • Give all team members a proper brief. See my earlier post on how to brief developers properly. Once you've written a work package, send it to the remote developer. Give them at least half a day to digest it. The next step is to do a desktop share and verbally step through the work package with them, line by line. During this desktop share session you'll flush out most of the questions and answers. Once they start development on the work package, make sure you review their progress every day via desktop share, reviewing their code and looking at the working software on their PC.
  • Here's some tools that I use with remote teams - Lotus Sametime Unyte, Webex, Skype. Actually, one of the coolest tools I've seen recently is MPK20 from Sun Microsystems. I'm not sure how effective it will be for remote teams but I can't wait to try it out on my next project!
  • If possible, bring the off-shore developers over to spend the first two weeks of the project on-shore working along side other project team members. This will serve as an excellent induction to the project which they can then take back with them.
  • If you have a significant number of off-shore developers on your project, bring one of them over to your offices to act as technical liaison for the duration of the project.

I'm very keen to hear other peoples experiences of working with remote teams both as developers and as managers. Please post any comments on this topic so others can share your experiences.