Exactly. For consulting company, you have to track how much time you spent on a project. I am allocated for a project for 100% for a week, sure we are going to bill for that week. But we don’t get paid until the project requirements are met. The client isn’t going to audit every hour. They are going to sign off based on results.
I’ll keep Jira updated at the end of the day because the PMO organization needs that for tracking and even we need that for coordination. But I am going to put in 40 hours at the end of the week.
No I’m not going to track hours I spent on internal meetings, conducting interviews and the other internal minutiae that takes up my day.
The company only makes money when I’m billing a client - that’s what I’m tracking - my results. Is the company making money on me and am I getting positive feedback from sales, my teammates and the customer.
Nope. As far as the client is concerned, payment is delayed until the requirements are met that were laid out in the statement of work. They could care less how many hours were put in.
I personally have put in extra hours to complete a project for a client that I did the proposal for as the SME in the technology because I underestimated. I’m a salaried employee for my consulting company and didn’t get paid extra.
Our consultants in Brazil and Mexico though while they also don’t have to track their hours for our benefit. They have to get approved to work over 8 hours a day because of labor laws in those countries. I can imagine that if they might do more granular tracking so they can justify the need to work (and get paid) for more hours.
As a team lead, I’m just going to track Jira stories being done on time if I need to be on the approval chain.
I have heard about projects at my current company where we have to give the client free work because the requirements weren’t met within the time allotted. I’m sure there were internal retrospectives where we had to go through our Jira board and see why stories were mis estimated or whether sales underestimated.
But even that falls on the implementation side because one of the staff consultants or engineering manager has to sign off on an SoW before it goes to the client.
Even during the retrospective, no one is trawling through Salesforce for details. We are looking at Jira.
I’m not saying we don’t track work output. I am saying we aren’t tracking granularly in our time tracking system that is only for billing clients. No one is expecting us to track every hour.
Usually that only works in Time-and-Material projects, and where management does a hard line with the original SOW, and the final delivery actually matches the original SOW.
When they don't, there are those hardliners that want a justification what they were paying for.
This is true. The three consulting companies/departments I have worked for have had T&M projects that are SOW based and staff augmentation projects.
I said in another reply (don’t remember whether it was to you or not) that I avoid staff augmentation projects for a lot of reasons.
But if you are in consulting and doing SoW based work, it’s a dereliction of duty by your tech lead not to insist on signed change order if the requirements veer materially from the SOW. It puts your company at risk of not being paid and/or having to do free work.
I’ll keep Jira updated at the end of the day because the PMO organization needs that for tracking and even we need that for coordination. But I am going to put in 40 hours at the end of the week.
No I’m not going to track hours I spent on internal meetings, conducting interviews and the other internal minutiae that takes up my day.
The company only makes money when I’m billing a client - that’s what I’m tracking - my results. Is the company making money on me and am I getting positive feedback from sales, my teammates and the customer.