Why Time Tracking Sucks (And How to Make it Suck Less)

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Kelsey Alpaio: Welcome back to our community event series. We hold sessions like this every month for our members so they can engage with experts who contribute to The Digital Project Manager. And today we've extended that invite to our newsletter subscribers and wider audience. So, welcome everyone!

My name is Kelsey Alpaio. I'm the Executive Editor for The Digital Project Manager. As I mentioned, this is just one of a series of monthly sessions we hold for our members who get access to a number of other benefits, including our entire back catalog of session recordings, our library of templates, resources, and mini-courses, as well as a discount to our flagship certification course, mastering Digital Project Management. You can join in on the fund by going to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership.

Let's dive into today's session. We are focusing on why time tracking sucks and how to make it suck less, and we have a really exciting group of speakers today that we are super lucky to have with us.

First up is Marcel Petitpas. Marcel is the CEO and Co-founder of Parakeeto, a company that specializes in agency profitability tools and software. He has helped hundreds of agencies measure the right metrics and improve both efficiency and profitability. He's also a bestselling author, a weightlifting and biohacking enthusiast, and a part-time beekeeper.

Marcel, welcome!

Marcel Petitpas: Hi. Thank you for having me. As I drink my fluorescent blue beverage, nothing more natural.

Kelsey Alpaio: Ooh!

Marcel Petitpas: Fluorescent beverages.

Kelsey Alpaio: Love a blue flavored beverage.

Marcel Petitpas: Yeah, blue flavor. Exactly. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Kelsey Alpaio: We also have Kelly Vega. Kelly is a seasoned PMO and program leader with a decade of experience delivering complex digital initiatives. Known for her strategic use of time tracking and resource planning, she builds high performing teams and processes that drive clarity, accountability, and results across fast-paced tech environments.

Kelly, welcome on in!

Kelly Vega: Thank you very much. So happy to be here.

Kelsey Alpaio: And we have Matthew Fox. Matthew is a project and operations consultant with deep experience helping agencies and tech teams streamline timelines, communications, and resource management. From managing time tracking tools to coaching teams on delivery efficiency, he brings a pragmatic real world lens to tracking what matters and making every hour count.

Matthew, welcome!

Matthew Fox: Thank you. Super excited to be here and also curious to hear about Marcel's weightlifting. I didn't know he was a fellow weightlifter.

Kelsey Alpaio: Ooh. Awesome. Let's get into it. We all know time tracking sucks. You wouldn't be here in this session if you were like, it's the best thing ever. I absolutely no. We also all know that time tracking isn't going anywhere. For a lot of us, it's how we bill our clients. It's how we justify the work that we're doing.

It's how we make decisions about resourcing, and for some of us, we're just told we have to do it. If we're going to keep doing it, we owe it to ourselves and to our teams to make it less painful and maybe even make it more useful. So that's why we're here today. And I wanna dive in first by tackling the question, why does time tracking suck so much?

I think it's annoying for everyone involved to some degree, whether you're an agency owner, a project manager, or an individual contributor. So I wanna get into each of those Headspace here. Marcel, why don't you get us started. What do agency owners and leaders tend to find most annoying about time tracking?

Marcel Petitpas: A lot of the discussion that tends to happen around time tracking being sucky is focused on tactical issues, but I've found that the real issues, and this ends up being the case across every level that we're talking about here, are cultural and strategic issues. And so at the leadership level, the first place that we often start the conversation is.

We don't even have an alignment on what metrics we're trying to measure, how we define those metrics, what decisions we're making around those metrics. What is actually the purpose of using this time tracking data. And that generally creates a lot of other symptomatic issues like misalignment on incentives within the organization.

The team really feeling like there's negative incentives around this time tracking data, feeling disdain to the leadership team, a sort of feeling of nagging the team and chasing them to get this data. I. Challenges with the cleanliness or completeness of this data so that it's not actually able to end up meeting the goals that they have for it.

So those sort of organizational and cultural issues tend to be really the root of a lot of the other things that get discussed around time track and being problematic.

Kelsey Alpaio: And from the PM side, Kelly, you're the one usually enforcing this process. So what do project managers find annoying about it?

Kelly Vega: I feel like there is just a resistance that comes from lack of transparency. Most often when I come in on a team, time tracking is typically in place, but it's either, not much is being done with it or what's being done with it isn't being explained to the PM team. And I think that having that assessment it's getting the groundwork of what is our definition of utilize, what is our definition of billable, non-billable.

How are we tracking it, getting all the foundation there, and then really a month to three months, you have enough data to look back and start saying, okay, things like, on average, this is how much non-billable time you're spending as a pm Let's talk about pm. Because that's where it's, it can be really ambiguous.

And you can start to set trends to give them a base of typically you're spending this much time on maybe non-billable. Now let's talk about your billable. Like how were the things scoped out? You can break everything down into building blocks of this is what your week should look like based on your workload.

Give them guidance knowing that you're not gonna hit that every week. It's gonna ebb and flow. But yeah, I think that biggest pain point is, why am I doing this? What are you doing with this data? It feels like micromanagement. I feel. It's surveillance more than it is. Something that helps our invoicing.

But it's, that's not true. And we gotta build that story, show them those data points regularly and assess them with accountability and teamwork more than, Hey, what's the problem here? It has to be seen not as failure, but that there's, there's a human part of time tracking no matter what.

Kelsey Alpaio: Absolutely. And then there's the individual contributor, the person actually tracking their time. What's the most common pushback there? Matthew, can you jump in here?

Matthew Fox: I think there's a couple things we get into that generalist versus specialist discussion that I talked about in the beginning where PMs I think can come under attack from management about where we're spending our time, how we're spending it.

I've seen lots of community posts about the fact that. It blends or blurs that line into operations. And as that, that individual contributor or that person just trying to get the work done, sometimes you feel micromanaged. Sometimes there's a lot of questions that come up that don't have that backing.

And to Marcel's point earlier, there's so many cultural things that are baked into it where just taking the freelancer point of view for a moment. We're not as invested in the culture of an organization. We're trying to come in and get a job done, and then if we're seeing cultural issues or we're running into things that we have no control over, all of a sudden we're put in a very awkward spot of being able to identify what's happening without having any responsibility or accountability or even that direct line into management like a full-time employee might have when you add into it.

The general frustration that comes up because I, I think one of the things we as project managers often see is where, like that first line of defense of when something starts to go off the rails or when something is breaking down, but we don't often have all the tools or the backing to actually solve it.

We just actually see it playing out, and then we're being blamed for why things are running behind. We're being blamed for why the team can't get things done. Time tracking actually can be one of the things that everyone likes to make the culprit so it, it becomes a very interesting dance.

Kelly Vega: It's weaponized.

Matthew Fox: It does very quickly.

Kelly Vega: And I think that from, like you have the noise from the clients with invoicing, if that exists, right? So that's a pressure. You have the profitability conversation, that's a pressure you have the utilization conversation, that's a pressure and all of that points largely usually to PMs, Hey, what's going on with this?

Then, we're either scrambling with a lot of data and you run into analysis paralysis, or it's organized in a way and you've been maintaining it and assessing it, and you can provide whatever story you're able to with that data.

Kelsey Alpaio: Absolutely. Before we continue to say terrible things about time tracking, I do also wanna give it its moment because, if everyone hated it and it was totally useless, we just wouldn't do it anymore, right?

So why is time tracking worth our time to care about? Why should we keep trying to fix the things that make it suck? Marcel, I'll toss this one to you first.

Marcel Petitpas: I'll speak to this mainly from the perspective of leadership. The short answer is you can't understand how profitable anything beyond the entire agency is without having a model of where time is being invested.

And I'm sure that we'll get into like how do we define time tracking? But I look at it as being, having a model of where time is going in the agency. That doesn't necessarily mean time sheets, but without that, because we're a service-based business and the majority of the cost that we incur to earn our revenue is time.

Time that we buy from our team in bulk and ideally resell to a client at a profit. And if we do that, everybody wins. The employee gets a job, the client gets value, and we get a profit. That's the arrangement. Without understanding where that time goes, we can't really know what it costs us to get things done.

Therefore, we can't understand how profitable clients, projects, service lines are, and it really limits our ability to do right by all the stakeholders in the business, including our team. And that should be the intention beyond time tracking. So that to me is like the biggest reason, certainly at the leadership level.

And I'm sure the rest of our panelists here will dig into the reasons it benefits everybody else too.

Kelsey Alpaio: Yeah. Kelly, do you wanna jump in next?

Kelly Vega: Absolutely. Echoing what everything that Marcel said, and also, for capacity planning. And we use time tracking, not just to answer to right fire drill, but also to plan ahead.

So when we are able to see trends from what was, or whether it be a deliverable. A certain discipline on a project or phase we're able to group that out with timeframe and time logged, and that's able to help us see trends of how we are resourcing people out, how we are hiring, possibly if people are burning too hot, if we do hire, what that workload should look like by looking at maybe what the other person who's hired in that position.

Has done, what does junior, mid, senior level look like for output on this type of deliverable? And that's in conversations maybe with bigger teams, but scaling to that, to have your data early on when you start getting more like junior mid. So it can help with hiring and looking at your team and strategizing that way.

Kelsey Alpaio: Yeah. Love all of that. Matthew, do you have anything to add here?

Matthew Fox: I love the points that Marcel and Kelly brought up the one other interesting thing. And this goes back to my days as a ba. I think a lot of the time project managers don't often grasp or will come late to the scope discussion or our least favorite person, which is scope creep.

And that's one of the interesting things that time tracking can start to uncover is when we thought something was going to be bigger or more complex, and maybe it was simpler or. Opposite of it. And one thing that we as panelists had talked about behind the scenes and I think is a common challenge for PMs, Gold plating.

I love that developers have these great ideas and they wanna build these beautiful systems. A lot of the time, especially in today's environment, we don't need that. And time tracking can be one of the ways that we can go back and start to have that discussion or get that information out and actually get to what's happening because time tracking is one of the indicators, but I think that helps us start the conversation.

So again, we can, whether we have to go back to a client or we have to go back to the team to have the discussion, we at least have some of the information to get us back.

Kelsey Alpaio: Yeah, absolutely. And there's obviously a lot of pros to getting time tracking, right? But there's also so many ways we can get it wrong.

And I wanna get into some time tracking horror stories here. And I'm wondering like, what are some really awful time tracking setups you've seen or dealt with in the past, and what did you do either to fix it or looking back, what would you change about how you handled it?

Kelly, I know you have some good stories here. You wanna jump in first?

Kelly Vega: I think I have plenty of stories, both in the categories of having too much fidelity of how you're tracking, how you're parsing it out. And you might have five minute increments and you might have categories that are set to a project, and then you have deliverables you're logging to.

And that's okay. Maybe there's a need and there's a balance. But then on the other side, where it is far too general and everyone's just, it's a dumping ground, so you have to ask yourself things like how much admin is going into each. Less admin for more general, more admin for less, or for, yeah, more specific.

And I think I've run in within those, each of those scenarios. Actually clients who had different reactions to what they wanted to see because of line item on invoices. And so it looks to the PM in those scenarios of we want more detail. Like, how much time are you spending on this? And now they're looking at all of those broken out tasks.

So as it relates to our own data management. Define what you need at your company, what works for your team. Yes, you can find okay, we have our utilization, we have this and we're tracking like this. Go off of, a base that's out there at default, but you have to find out what you truly for your deliverables or phases, time and materials, fixed fee, all of that.

What is your team best structured to do and set that for yourself or revisit it if you need to scale a little bit.

Kelsey Alpaio: Yeah, I love that. Marcel, what about you? What are some of the time tracking setups that you've seen And what have you done to fix them?

Marcel Petitpas: Yeah. So like at a tactical level, the most common issue that we run into is exactly what Kelly is describing, which is you have a massive disconnect between the level of fidelity that's required to actually fulfill the objectives of the organization and the level of fidelity that's trying to be pursued in the project management or time tracking system.

So a perfect example of this is we're like, Hey, what's the most important question that you need to answer? And they're like, oh, we want to know profitability by client. And I'm like, great. The 19 different data points that you're trying to append to a time entry when you're tracking the subtask on the task within the deliverable, within the milestone, within the client, within the phase.

And then you wonder why you have 25% time tracking compliance. It's because your team has to make 17 decisions every time they log a time entry. That's way too much friction. And there's a direct correlation between how complex and how much friction there is and how much compliance you're gonna get.

And so radically simplifying those time tracking setups, that's the most common thing we run into. From a compliance perspective. Another thing that's nuanced that I think is worth calling out here, especially for the PMs in the room, is sometimes it's great to have time tracking in the project management tool, but sometimes that actually isn't the right move.

It's counterproductive. And the reason for that is if you have a different set of requirements from the leadership perspective in terms of what the data schema needs to look like. And then you start coupling that to the project management tool, you might end up in a situation where one of those two parties needs to make a compromise.

Because what tends to happen is the structure of the project management tool starts to dictate the structure of the time tracking data and sometimes decoupling those things gives both parties the freedom to do what they need. It allows the PMO to be very flexible in how they set up milestones and phases and task lists and naming conventions and tags.

They can leave a lot of that stuff very unstructured. And as long as you have a simple bridge or you have some logic statements that you can use in your data cleanup process, then you can have time tracking and project management be separated. It's not always better to have them put together, so it's another important call out.

But the biggest issues that we've seen have all been cultural, and it's generally been. That the organization was very lopsided in their incentives, so they were like hyper fixated on utilization. Therefore, they had accuracy and cultural problems where people just were always super busy no matter how much client work there was to do, or the flip side, they were punitive about budgets on projects.

And therefore, even if people were absolutely slammed and working through weekends, they somehow magically never exceeded the budget. And that to me is the biggest problem that we have to address. It's a lot harder than some of these tactical issues that have to do with implementation.

Kelly Vega: Yeah. Time tracking becomes meaningful the moment we make it rational. And that has to be told, explained. I love that.

Kelsey Alpaio: Matthew, I see you in the chat as well, talking about PM tools, not doing a great job at time tracking. Can you talk a little bit more about that or tell us a little bit more about the systems you've seen that Don't do a great job?

Matthew Fox: Yeah, so I have a love hate relationship with tools like Clickup. I think it's great that it's trying to do everything, but what ends up happening is it does most things pretty well, and some things pretty terrible. And there becomes this delusion I find with leadership where they say, Hey, we bought the tool, and now the tool should do everything.

It should do forecasting, it should do time tracking, should do all the things. Then as a PM when I go in there to actually use the tool, I'm like it's getting me about 50 to 75% of the way there, and now I have to do all these behind the scenes calculations to actually get the information I need out of it.

I also have a love hate relationship with tools like Harvest, where I think tools like Harvest and Forecast, they do a great job with time tracking, and then you get into the reporting and like your UI falls off very quickly, and so it gets really frustrating about. How we're supposed to use all of these tools to get work done.

At the end of the day, it becomes interesting in the sense that as a pm I tend to buck the trend a little bit because I don't care as much sometimes about process. I don't care as much sometimes about setting things up perfectly in the tool. I care about getting things done and getting things done as quick as possible with the clients or whatever we need to do.

And the tools end up creating work, or they end up creating jobs where we didn't need to spend all that much time in there before. And looking at some of the comments in chat, we're going into forecast and we're trying to get it. Perfect in there. And then we'll get questions back from leadership about where do I find this information?

And we're pointing 'em back to the tool. So even they don't understand how to use the tools that we're getting them to invest in. And so there's this weird dance that's happening. I don't have a perfect answer here. I wish I did. I think that's what I'll sum it up with is we're getting so many promises, for example, with AI, with the tools that are out there that.

I don't think there's a world where manual intervention is not going to exist. I think there's always gonna be some manual work we're gonna have to do as a pm. There's always going to be an educational piece to kinda round out with what other people have talked about as well, that management's gonna start to look at the tools and try to make decisions off of it.

And it's one piece of the puzzle. And. Again, I could keep rambling for a long time about this because I've had so many frustrations and challenging conversations about it that we're close, but yeah, the tools just aren't there yet.

Kelsey Alpaio: Marcel, I see you, you have un unmuted jump in here.

Marcel Petitpas: I'm gonna try my best not to go on a long rant about this, but what Matt is saying is so important.

The trap that I see so many people fall into is believing that I. The place where the work happens and where the data is created should also be the place that all the reporting is done. And I think if you go out and try to hire project management and time tracking tools, or even PSAs to do both work management and reporting, you will fail 100% of the time.

And the key reason for it is it's, that's based on an assumption that is fundamentally never true, which is the data will be clean. The data won't be clean. It never has been clean. It never will be clean. People will make mistakes. Even if you can somehow get militant, perfect compliance on inputs, your organization's gonna change things.

You're gonna rename this department, you're gonna start selling new services, you're gonna change the way you structure things. You're gonna. Change the naming convention for how clients are structured, and so just assume that you're always gonna have to use an ETL or an ELT process. You're gonna extract data from all the different places that it exists, which is constantly changing.

You're gonna have to write logic statements, like if the task has one of 18 names that are all different ways that people like to say the word design, then it's design time. And then you can finally run your report that says, how much design time have we spent on the last 20 websites that we built? But just assume that you're always gonna have to do that.

In the same way that you're always gonna have to have a bookkeeper doing your bookkeeping. And yes, AI will help dramatically reduce the amount of time that you spend doing those things, but unfortunately, that context and human judgment will still be required. And if you think about the fact that we've had a human doing that process in finance for ever, and that we still haven't displaced that, think about how much cleaner finance data is.

Then ops data, humans create a hundred percent of ops data. They create 0% of finance data, and yet we still need a human being to clean that stuff up before it's accurate. So I think like this idea is a big one. I just hope that PMs can free themselves from this belief that will only ever disappoint them, which is that there's some world in which all of this is automated and the data's just clean and they can just run a report and everything's great.

That's just not gonna happen. So stop trying to pursue that.

Kelly Vega: I can't disagree. I know coming from the tech perspective where you know, Atlassian, JIRA is largely where the work is being done or logged and what have you. I will say that I have seen night and day difference where time tracking is required for those teams within Jira itself, tempo, what have you.

Because yes, there are tools that PMs can manage. Yes, there are APIs that can exist and you can help that time tracking be in one nice place. But to have a dev in this case. Someone from a tech team logging in either both spots or just the PM tool and not the tool within which they're doing the work.

Like you gotta, yeah, flex and ebb and flow on what is best for your team. And I have to say, from a tech perspective, I would wholeheartedly advise that if the work is largely being done in something like Atlassian, JIRA, the that's where the time should be tracked. If you can pull it off and whatnot.

Kelsey Alpaio: Yeah, absolutely. And my next question is around these tools still, but the way that they're going to change and be impacted by AI. I know a few of you have mentioned kind of AI solutions emerging and what that will look like for teams and for time tracking in particular. But yeah, I wanna dive into that more.

Like what ways will AI change the way we approach this process? Marcel, do you wanna jump in there first?

Marcel Petitpas: Sure. I'm happy to share what we're seeing on the ground at Parakeeto as we work with a lot of clients, and this is a big part of what we have to work with them on, is getting a system in place for project time and people data that helps 'em get the outcomes that they want from a reporting perspective.

The first thing that I'll touch on, which I think is a big idea, is back to my original definition of time tracking, which is the goal is not to fill out time sheets. That's not inherently what time tracking is. It's to create a model of where time is going that is accurate. For it to be accurate. It doesn't need to be precise.

That's a relative concept. So for example, if your time tracking is off by three hours on a project, is that accurate? It depends. If the project was only three hours long, then yes, it's a hundred percent error bar around that time tracking data. But if it was 3000 hours long, that is completely immaterial.

So I think this is a big idea. And with that in mind. A lot of the tech that's emerging is helping us move either to the complete other side of time tracking, which is what we call centralized time tracking. We might reference it as resource plan based time tracking, where instead of having individual contributors on the team, this decentralized way of tracking time, having everybody put in time sheets every week, you just build a resource plan.

And if you have a strong PMO, and if you have the benefit of being able to allocate people, like for a full day's work or a half day's work, or several days at a time on one thing. That becomes significantly more manageable for a project manager to do on behalf of everybody else. And the PM happens to be the only person in the organization that you know is likely to get excited about time tracking.

And so that works really well. And this happens to be the thing that a lot of big firms that brag about, not tracking time, this is actually what they're doing to track time. They're just not using time sheets, but they like to lie and say, we don't track time, because it makes them seem really cool and it helps 'em attract talent.

And then there's a whole bunch of things that are not quite that. But that are much more feasible today with technology. The next one is resource plan, informed time tracking, where the IC still logs in to correct things, but it's pre-filled with what they were allocated to. And again, we're just trying to capture material differences there.

And then the thing that I think is becoming even better now is assisted. Time tracking. So you have these agents sit on your computer, they watch what you do, they, they watch you interact with project management tools and send emails and work on things. And some of these tools mem time is a good example of this.

That information is completely private. It's not shared with your employer. It's not taking screenshots, it's not an invasion of your privacy. Those other tools do exist, but I'm not personally a big fan of them. But what it's there to do is help you keep track of all the things that you spent time on and take a lot of that friction out of filling in your time sheets.

Stuff like that paired with calendar management tools, paired with, some resource plan informed tools. And then even now we're seeing some agentic chat bots, for example, that plug into Slack and just, I. Talk to you like a PM would talk to you and say, Hey Matt, I saw that you were scheduled on three projects today.

How much time did you spend on them? And you go, oh, I spent about this, and this one took a little longer than expected. And then boom, your time sheets are filled in. So that kind of technology is getting much, much better, and I think is gonna help pull a lot of people that are stuck right now in time sheets, away from pure time sheets, as we've known it before, towards more of this assistive or preloaded kind of time management practice.

Matthew Fox: There's so many things that are coming with AI, and the potential for it, I think is incredibly disruptive but we don't know yet. To your point, Marcel, about the agentic tracking, I have a nightmare scenario where I've had more than one business owner say, I wanna go back. I wanna see where this person's spending all their time.

I think they're wasting their time somewhere. And it's furthering that weaponization of a valuable tool. And I notice like. Almost wanting to hide under my desk or like running out of a room where I do think if there's something that can sit on the desktop or I forget what the tool is called, but I've picked up one of these in the past where it is a external tool that allows us to track time.

I wanna say it's timely or another device, but I think another interesting thing, and a few people have mentioned this in chat, is that. Where, how much of what we're doing is becoming a commodity, and it's really interesting to go into with AI in the sense of, I know developers are expressing fear about this.

There's some fear on the design side and from a PM standpoint, if a tool is doing most of the work or if a tool is spinning out information. I think it changes the forecasting. I think it changes how we spend time. I think it changes the buckets that we're actually gonna be investing in. And I know we just, as human creatures we wanna have answers, but I don't think there's gonna be any answers for a little while until the dust settles.

I, I know there's role hybridization that's going on. I know that there's a bunch of things that AI is changing the conversation around. I still go back to the argument that I think it's empty promises at this point where it's probably going to be at least another six months to a year before we're really gonna have a grasp on it.

The smaller agencies are just trying to scramble to figure out what to do with it, and the bigger agencies are getting sold from. Companies who I will not call out name, but they're getting sold, ways that AI is gonna revolutionize things and then it takes those larger consulting firms six months to a year to actually implement things that don't actually return the value that they were promised.

So I'd, if this is coming from ownership, that you're getting pressure about, these AI tools should be doing something, I think it's okay to push back on them if you as a PM are curious. I would just explore and figure out what's going on because tools like clickup are integrating AI into the system, but we don't actually know what it's doing yet.

We don't actually know what productivity gains we're getting.

Kelsey Alpaio: Kelly, I saw you. You mentioned you're not sure if the AI dust tool settle. Talk a little bit more about that and your take on all this.

Kelly Vega: I think that, AI has, and it will continue to reduce friction, but it will never have the ability to story tell things like where in the project one hour logged is what change the project's trajectory.

So AI will, I do think it will automate things as it does, but we do have to. Like it will amplify trust issues if it's not maintained and checked, right? Like someone has to be monitoring that and then from there telling the story of what that data is saying, we're entering this era where productivity is not just the hours worked, but what you're doing within those hours.

We've seen many examples of how companies have said with AI related to AI, like, how are you gonna make this quality work given AI? What is it gonna do that you can't do? For time tracking, I think we can meet that with oh, okay, then what? And what is it gonna do? Yes. Okay. If unchecked, right?

At the end of the day, these are all prompts and it's all feeding data based on data giving to it. So what can then we add as humans to that? We've talked about luxury human interaction being a luxury, and I think this is another place where AI's going to give us that take away some friction of that time tracking and now we get to take that.

Tell the story of what's going on.

Kelsey Alpaio: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, let's get into your questions. This first one from Bethan actually goes back to that trust element of all of this, especially in, that AI world where it's automatically tracking what we do. Bethan asks, we need to bill our clients based on time logs.

People hate doing it. It's damaging our culture and feels like micromanagement. How do we allow for accurate billing without people feeling like we're tracking their every move?

Matthew Fox: It's interesting I've run into this a couple times where for agencies, clients may wanna have that individualized time tracking, so they'll get the spreadsheet of where we spent the hours and what we did.

The way I've tried to buffer that is. I will get the information from the team and then go back and massage it before it goes to the client. And I wanna be very clear, I'm not doing magic with the numbers. What I am doing is putting it into buckets that makes sense. And then trying to reassure the team that here's why we're using the information, it can lead to trust issues.

That's where I'll also go back to management and again, be that buffer between what's happening with the staff and then defend them. To understand hey, if something took a little bit longer or if we're going a little bit sideways in where we thought we were going, what would happen? Sometimes that may mean eating hours internally for the organization, though I'm sure Marcel will have some great ideas about how not to do that.

But beyond that, I really think that comes back to a trust issue and. Going back to the team, educating them about why we're doing it, what we're doing it, the PM actually taking the information and not just handing the exact log over to the client, working on it ahead of time. For example, again, I would pull information from Harvest, put it into a spreadsheet, and then massage it or work on it together so that way it presented that story back to the client.

And then worked with management in case any concerns came up.

Marcel Petitpas: I'll just add that it, it sounds like in this organization, the conversation is focused on billing clients and using time tracking for client billing, and that's the problem. If that's the only conversation that's happening, then of course it's gonna suck and the culture's gonna be bad and people are not gonna like it.

And so the question I would ask is, are they also involved in the other conversations that ideally should be happening around this data? Are we doing a good job of managing resources and making sure that people aren't overworked and burnt out? Are we keeping the team properly staffed so that we don't have to do layoffs?

The second that we have a client that pulls back or we miss an RFP? Are we having curiosity based conversations around this data to sit down with the team and say, Hey, here's a project that went way off the rails. What can we learn from this? What did we get wrong in the scoping process? Is there something about our process that's getting in your way and never having punitive conversations around the data?

That is what I'm reading between the lines quite a bit here, but that's the sense that I'm getting is, and this is one of the challenging things, when you are in a situation where you have to bill for time, is that, is the first priority. 'cause it, it's literally like a requirement that you have.

But I think it's important that we look past that and try to have a more holistic conversation so the team understands, the real reasons behind time tracking that should persist regardless of what your billing model is.

Kelly Vega: I do think that it's so important to pull that string through. Of course you're not downloading the PM team on everything from the executive decisions and what's going on in those meetings, but you can pull through what profitability story, whether it's related to a project or a discipline or what have you, overall and utilization.

And you can tell that story. Like I, I found myself usually monthly talking to the PMs about okay, this is how things are feeling. I know things have been slower, but we just got done with Black Friday, cyber Monday. A lot of contracts are out there, like we see those trends, we know those trends so that we can speak to them as a PM group.

And then in one-on-ones, if it's more about like utilization or whatever of time tracking, but as long as you can be like, all right, what questions do you have? Does this make sense? Do you feel pressure that you think is unjustified and how, and then they can be like, yeah, I feel like I am. I'm on 20 projects, I'm still not hitting utilization 'cause I'm scrambling every which way.

And it's okay, let's tell that story. Let's pair this down, have you work on more focus, see what that outcome is, or just tell that story as is. And I can bring that to the executive team and say, listen, they wanna hit their utilization. This is why it isn't happening first. What are your goals? Is the prop priority here?

Profitability. Utilization. Find that out from the executive team, make sure they can answer that so that you can tell that story properly. I think a lot of assumptions get made either way because that's just how it goes. I don't think there's a lot of dissipation of information when it comes to time sheets, so that can go a long way.

Yeah. How is utilization being defined? That's huge. Is that, that was rhetorical, right?

Marcel Petitpas: Yeah. The answer is there's seven different ways to define it in the organization, but nobody even knows that they disagree on it.

Kelly Vega: I believe that.

Kelsey Alpaio: Yeah, absolutely. I. And this next question here, I think it goes back to that idea, I think it was you, Marcel, who was saying like, the data is never going to be clean.

It's not going to be perfect. But we got a couple questions in the chat around how to clean up that data using logic. So Marcel, I don't know if you wanna jump in here and offer some advice there.

Marcel Petitpas: I'm gonna talk about this at a conceptual level and I'll try to just cement it in a very tactical example that's accessible to everybody on this call.

This is best practice in data management. If you go to any large organization, they have an entire team of people generally called the data ops team, and there's literally engineers and data scientists and they spend millions of dollars on this team. And their whole job is just to get data from all over the place and clean it up and build reports for people.

And it's crazy that. That's still a place where everybody's been under investing, but now that AI's a thing, you're hearing that Enterprise is finally paying down a lot of their data ops debt. We're now only learning about the dysfunction in small business. Now that we have access to more data than we've ever had access to at a lower cost.

The key idea is you follow an ETL framework, which stands for extract, transform, and Load, or you can flip the Extract, load transform. The idea is what this looks like in practice for most of us, is we take all the data out of harvest and. Click up and QuickBooks and we pull it into a spreadsheet, and then the simple starting point is we write what we would call a logic statement, and a logic statement could look something like, if the client's name is spelled like this, or like this, then normalize it to this one version of the client's name that we're actually using to run the reports.

If the phase has one of these six tags, normalize that to this. If the project has the client name, our agency. Mark the time as non-billable. This is a big one. The way that billable gets defined in the project management or time tracking tool is almost never accurate. And so we use the logic statements to define what is billable and non-billable time for all of our clients, because it's just not really feasible to try and define that inside the tool.

You're just never gonna have good compliance on that. So that's the simple logic statement for us, is if the client's name is us, it's not billable. That's it. End of story. It's very simple. So that's at a high level the idea and there are some tools out there that you can do use. Open Refine is a open source tool and it gives you, the power to do a lot of this stuff.

And there's some really exciting AI tools coming out that sort of help you append AI to that workflow. It's a thing that we're all doing, but I think learning about this process and treating it like a formal part of the process, I think will empower you to make that more efficient and hopefully get a lot better data out of it.

Kelsey Alpaio: Just follow up question in the chat, is that being done in Excel or Google Sheets?

Marcel Petitpas: For us, we built a whole technology platform that helps us do this. It's like a QuickBooks for Ops data, but for a lot of people, yes, you're just doing this in a Google sheet or an Excel table, or maybe you're using Airtable or maybe you're using actual, a data lake or Google Data Studio or some kind of data manipulation tool.

But yes, generally a spreadsheet is where most of us start and we're, that's where we're writing these things as formulas. And I will also say Gemini, ChatGPT. An incredible way to write very complex formulas that like, I don't even have the technical skill to write just by telling it like, this is what I want the formula to do.

And then it gives you a paragraph that you paste into a cell and all of a sudden it takes, your 10,000 rows of time tracking data and does the thing that you want it to do. So it's a little hot tip ChatGPT will get you very far.

Kelsey Alpaio: Awesome. We got quite a few questions in the chat. Around encouraging your team to wanna track their time more frequently.

So we have, how can I get my team to log their time more frequently? We have half my team is tracking. The other half isn't. How do I make them do it more promptly? Kelly, I wonder if you have any thoughts around this.

Kelly Vega: I touched on this, where it's like you can come up with building blocks of a default start because I think staring at a blank time sheet is all of our veins of existence.

So what I have done is I've retroactively looked at people's time or just myself. I always start with chunking out an non-billable typical chunk of Hey, I'm doing this much admin every day. I'm doing this. So I can chunk out okay, on average, not when, but about this much time you're spending now with your projects, it's gonna ebb and flow.

But again, if you're like. 20% pm time on this project. Chunk that out, build out a framework for each of those PMs or encourage them to try to, just an exercise. I know we don't have all the time in the world, but that will give them a basis. And I don't know what the tool you use looks like, but I know that we were doing within like tempo, we were building out time ahead of time so that they could just check it.

But be careful because with automation comes, it gets a little easy. So the paint is always gonna be there, I think. Letting the conversation be open and transparent. I do think talking goes a long way about it that makes it less painful and being real about it. Hey, I too have felt this right.

Don't always just maybe relay the pressure that you're feeling from the other side. Not to say that's the case, but oftentimes it is. Just try to boil that down a bit. Yeah, we're doing our best. How can we make it easier? Find out from them what can make it easier. Have them talk about how they track it differently.

I'm an everyday girly, I have to be, or I'm a month out girly. There's no in between.

Kelsey Alpaio: Yeah, absolutely. Matthew, I see you commenting on this as well in the chat. I don't know if you wanna chime in here.

Matthew Fox: I go back and forth on it. I think that owners want to penalize because they get frustrated, they get upset about the fact that like people aren't tracking their time, I have to go talk to 'em.

Or they, it becomes, this has like finger pointing exercise and it goes back to the carrot and the stick. Is it better to reward people with a carrot or use the stick and. I think it's okay from a company policy and I think this gets back to something that Marcel brought up very early in our conversation where culturally people don't understand why you're time tracking or I would even lightly go into the territory of many of the people we may be working with, especially I find in the dev sector, maybe somewhere on a spectrum.

I'm not gonna say which spectrum, but. That could introduce a challenge to why or how time tracking doesn't make sense to them, or it becomes very challenging. And again, I think if there's a way to tie it back to cultural values or company values or something that is part of the DNA of a company. And again, I imagine Marcel would have some really interesting insights around this one in the perspective of we aren't tracking time to.

Analyze everything we're doing. We're tracking time because if we don't get paid or if we don't track time, this is what ends up happening. And I, again, I find a lot of the time it's really trying to go back and explain to people that this is why we're doing it. And to have that conversation about why it's a challenge or what's blocking them.

Because some of the time it may end up being that, I think something Kelly mentioned earlier is if they're over allocated, they don't have time to track time during the day. They're so busy doing everything else. Maybe they have other life challenges that are going on and they're just trying to get through the day.

So time tracking slips their mind. There could be a lot of things behind this.

Marcel Petitpas: I'm just gonna append on all this. I agree with everything that Matthew and Kelly said. I agree with all the tactical things that were mentioned as well, like as much friction as you can remove from the process, go ahead and do that.

But what I think I will say from experience is closing the loop. Is the most important thing. And what I mean by that is actually showing them how their data influences decision making and having the conversation with them. And this is just I think, a basic human psychology principle. There's a reason that we brush our teeth even though it's not fun.

There's a reason that we go to the gym and we eat broccoli even though nobody likes those things. And it's because we understand how they benefit us. And so I think that if you can change. The psychology around time tracking the tolerance for suckiness goes up, and if you don't, there's no amount of decreasing the suckiness that's actually gonna solve this fundamental problem.

So I think that's really where you have to start. And one of the my favorite tricks for this, I've spoken to a lot of owners that are like, they think this is chicken and egg game. They're like I can't talk to my team about the data until the data's good, but the data's not gonna be good until you start talking to the team about it.

So I think when you know the data's bad. One of my favorite ways to have this conversation is you go and you sit down with them and you pretend you don't know that. So you're like, oh my God guys, this is incredible. Our clients are thrilled. All of our projects are way under budget, and we could take on twice as many clients next month and we wouldn't need to hire any additional staff.

And all of a sudden the team's gonna be like, wait a second. It's possible that not all of our time is in the system, so that's not really accurate. And then you can be like, oh my God, I'm so glad you told me that. I would hate to, over resource you guys. This is why it's important that I have an understanding of how busy you actually are so that we can make sure we're not making that mistake.

And then the following month, all of a sudden it's all the projects are going over budget. 'cause they're like, oh shit, we better get all of our time into the system. And then you have the other conversation, which is oh wow, it looks like we're really underestimating our projects. We really need to be thinking about how to get more efficient.

Like what can we do to get this stuff done quicker? And as long as you're having a balanced conversation and you're showing them, if you tell me this is what's happening, this is the type of decision I have to make. Very quickly. After a few cycles, you'll start to find that the behaviors will change, but until that loop gets closed, left to their own devices, if the team is gonna come up with a story about what's happening, it's not gonna be a good one.

Kelsey Alpaio: Yeah, absolutely. I. I guess around this as well is another question from an audience member is how do you break through the mindset of, we've always done it this way, so if you're trying to change the way your organization approaches time tracking, what are some ways to break through that?

Matthew Fox: The more I lean into this, I think so many things start and end with culture.

It's almost in the sense there's a, hopefully I'm gonna say his name right. There's a person out of Chicago named Gustavo, who created something called the Cultural Reset. And there's a cultural map. There's a whole bunch of research he's done around this. And what it does, I think for a lot of agencies and a lot of other organizations, they start with best interests at heart.

They start with a. A really technical person who wanted to do something or a design oriented person. Often people who have a lot of domain expertise, but they either don't have great managerial skills or don't have great leadership skills, or sometimes they're terrible at both of those things and they just have really good domain skills, so they don't think or look at things like we do as project managers about, okay, let's organize time.

Let's get all these things together and. Ideally, you're starting at the top and the bottom in the sense that leadership is expressing to the team about why this is important, and then the project managers are helping reinforce that. At the end of the day, it may be one-on-one conversations, it may be general things that you can push out, for example.

Some things that I've done on a super tactical level. We use slack as some organizations. So we'll put reminders in about, Hey, get your time into your time sheets, get time into forecasting. There can be other ways to do it where, again, going back to something I put in chat, if you can incentivize people and you can make it so that way Hey, anyone who is going to do this is gonna get a $50 gift card now.

Leaders, again, may not wanna do something like that, and there would be other ways to incentivize it, but that's what I would go back to is if you're really facing a lot of resistance internally, or you haven't done this before, it's almost like you're doing a road show of getting out. Hey, let's go on the road.

Let's help people understand why we're doing it. Let's talk to their concerns, for example. One thing I tried to do in harvest that was not a good idea was force everyone to put notes in about tasks. But I let everyone know Hey, this is why we're doing it. It's not because we want to, it's because we have to.

And I got immediate pushback. So that was real time feedback. Like it didn't work, so we turned it off. It's having that flexible mindset and working back and forth with the team. I did go on for a long time about this, but I wanna see if any of the other panelists have input as well.

Marcel Petitpas: I just added an app to the chat by my friend Carson.

It's called TimeJam. It just connects to Slack and it puts people like cross-functional teams into teams and then it just creates a little competition around time tracking compliance. And a lot of his clients, they will have incentives. You get a gift card or you get a day off or whatever.

It just creates what we call ambient accountability, where it's like every day there's a post in a general Slack channel, and if you're not compliant on time tracking, then everybody sees that and you have a little bit of embarrassment and it's actually quite effective in a lot of the organizations that they use it in.

And again, it's more of an incentive than a punitive based sort of measure to try and get compliance up.

Kelsey Alpaio: I love that. Super, super fun. Unfortunately we are out of time here, but big thank you to our panelists. It was so much fun. Thank you for sharing your expertise today. Have a great rest of your day everyone.

That's it for today's Retro. Be sure to follow the show so you never miss an episode. And if you wanna keep the conversation going with a crew of 1,000+ project management pros who get it, come join us at thedpm.com/membership. Thanks for listening!