Part 2: Tracking tasks, or - Where the hack did my time go to last week? #
After summarising some strategies for not loosing track of tasks, meetings and conferences in the last post, this one
is going to focus on the retrospect on achievements. If at some point in time you have asked yourself “Where the hack
did time go to?” - maybe after two busy weeks of work this article might have a few techniques for you.
Usually
when that happens to me it’s either a sign that I’ve been on vacation (where that is totally fine) or that too many
different, sometimes small but numerous tasks have sneaked into my schedule.
Together with Thilo I have found a few techniques helpful in dealing with these kind of problems.
The goals in applying them (at least for me) have been:
- Configure the planned work load to a manageable
amount.
- Make transparent and trackable (to oneself and others) which and how many tasks have been
finished.
- Track over time any changes in number of tasks accomplished per time slot.
After hearing about Scrum and its way of planning tasks I thought about using it not only for software development but for task planning in general. Scrum comprises some techniques that help achieving the goals described above:
- In Scrum, development is split into sprints: Iterations of focussed software development that
are confined to a fixed length. Each sprint is filled up with tasks. The number of tasks put into one sprint is defined
by the so-called velocity of the team.
- Tasks are ordered by priority by the product owner. Priority here is
influenced by factors like risk (riskier tasks should be attacked earlier than safe ones), ROI (those tasks that
promise to increase ROI most should of course be done and launched first) and a few more. After priorisation, tasks are
estimated in order - that way those tasks most important to the product owner are guaranteed to have an estimated
complexity defined even if there was not enough time to estimate all items.
- Complexity here does not mean
“amount of time to implement a feature” - it’s more like how much time do we need, how much communication overhead is
involved, how complex is the feature. A workable way to come up with reasonably sensible numbers is to chose one base
item, assing complexity of one to it and estimate all coming items in terms of “is as complex as the base item”, “has
double the complexity” - and so on - according to the fibonacci series. Fibonacci is well suited for that task as do
not increase linearly - similarly humans are better at estimating small things (be it distances or complexities). As
soon as items get too big, estimation also tends to be way off the real number.
- To come up with a reasonable
estimate of what can be done in any week, I usually just look back to past weeks and use that as an estimate. That
technique is close enough to the real number to be a working approach.
To track what got done during the past week, we use a whiteboard as Scrum Board. Putting tasks into the known categories of todo, checked out and done. That way when resetting the board after one week and adding tasks for the following week it is pretty obvious which actions ate up most of the time. The amount of work that goes onto the board is restricted to not be larger than what got accomplished during the past week.
So what goes onto the whiteboard? Basically anything that we cannot track as working hours: The Hadoop Get Together can be found just next to doing the laundry. Writing and sending out the long deferred e-mail is put right next to going out for dinner with potential sponsors for free software courses at university.
Now that weekly time tracking is set-up - is there a way to also come up with a nice longer term measure? Turns out, there are actually three:
First and most obviously the whiteboard itself provides an easy measure: By tracking weekly velocity and plotting that against time it is easy to identify weeks with more or less freetime. As a second source of information a quick look into ones calendar quickly shows how many meetings and conferences one attended over the course of a year. Last but not least it helps to track talks given on a separate webpage.
It helps to look back from time to time: To evaluate the benefit of the respective activities, to not loose track of the tasks accomplished, to prioritise and maybe re-order stuff on the ToDo list. Would be great if you’d share some of your techniques of tracking and tracing time and tasks - either in the comments or as a separate blog post.