Solve360 Discussion Forums

Effectiveness Rating in Time-Records

Jul 05, 2010 11:21pm Izzy Sentinel 22 posts	Hey All, I don’t know if many of the Solve’360 users will want something like this. In my industry, we are very ‘brain-time’ oriented, which is different than say ‘body-time’ . It is where one could be physically working on a customer project, but not working at full potential. I would like an option (slider) to gauge a time-record’s effectiveness rating. The hours would still be there, but a percentage would be added to say. “Izzy worked on So-and-So Task, and billed 4 hours to this project with a reported 50% effectiveness rating” We would still bill for 4hrs, but I can then look into _why_ Izzy felt he was not so effective in those 4 hours. It would fulfill my two desires, my desire to bill per hour, and my desire to know where to start looking for problems my people are having. Its a simple way to flag productivity. The idea is not my own. It comes from a popular book on software development; “Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.“ The authors posit that billable hours are not good indicators of “real meaningful work,“ and for us billable hours is a side-effect of work; our goal is supporting our customers competently and effectively. Right now, as we use Solve’360 (as progressive as it is) it would still behave like the old ‘more hours = better’ mantra of consulting. I would love this idea to be considered in the software we use to support our customers & relationships. I hope others feel the same way, and would support such an addition. -Izzy

Jul 06, 2010 12:35am Carl Benfield Lyncean 165 posts	Izzy, I really like the concept - having seen technical guys get interrupted constantly by sales guys (both doing their jobs), it is clear that distractions/IT limitations/ lack of knowledge management etc all have a massive impact on the measure. However I see some potential pitfalls (no doubt the book you speak of will answer them): 1. Effectiveness is a subjective measure and will vary wildly form one employee to another. Therefore is there any merit in holding it on a system that is collective by nature? Would it not be just as beneficial (and meaningful) to discuss effectiveness with the employee at their periodic review? 2. If Solve were to record effectiveness, it would also need to record the reason for the effectiveness rating - another box to fill in would slow things down and would likely not be completed. 3. Addressing the “more hours=better” mantra, this really becomes the focus of improving competitiveness, especially in a consultancy. In my view, the project manager should allocate sufficient time and resource to the employee to do the work. If it’s completed on quality, but under time, the employee gets a bonus (which is more motivating than feeling like someone is recording your every move). I look forward to hearing what others have to say.

Jul 06, 2010 02:09am dave@vm Lyncean 727 posts	I’m not sure if this would fully meet your needs, but you can try it: Go to Workspace, Customize Form Fields, Edit Task Fields then add either a text of number field, or you could make a pulldown field called ‘Effectiveness’ with 0, 25, 50, 75, 100% etc Then the user simply chooses the Effectiveness when completing the task Not sure how you could gather this in a report for future analysis, but at least something to consider trying

Jul 06, 2010 09:10am Engineering SpecialOps Administrator 3952 posts	Hi Izzy. Yes we are familiar with the concept. Dave’s custom field would work for individual tasks and in your case you may want a field for “reason for ineffectiveness”. This would be handy on a case by case basis but probably not for any type of aggregate data or reporting. It could be a useful future feature if this type of rating is in demand. Thanks for sharing