Software Development Leaders Most Concerned about Wasted Time

Not all companies track their developers’ and engineers’ time the same way, for the same reasons, and surprisingly often still use spreadsheets. Manually logging time requires developers to remember what they’ve done and frequently stop work to record activities--a seemingly innocuous activity, but it really is a time sink. We recently polled 800 organizations from the US and Europe and found software development leaders are most concerned with capacity, and are looking to automation to eliminate mundane tasks that waste developers’ time. 

Not surprisingly, wasting time is the leading concern for team managers. “Wasting time” is a big category, so for the sake of this research it means working on mundane tasks, projects that don’t deliver a healthy (or any) return, wasted cycles, lost opportunity costs, and other forms of significant revenue leakage. Other concerns included: 

  • The need to up-level capacity with automation
  • Using legacy processes that are not reflective of today’s tech landscape
  • Lack of talent or capacity needed to complete necessary tasks

The inconsistencies caused by not having efficient time management and tracking tools sounds like a department-level issue, but our survey found impacts stretch across the organization. Time insights are used to inform: 

  • Collaborative work management 
  • Project and portfolio management 
  • Workforce management 
  • Product management and roadmapping
  • Enterprise agile planning 
  • Value stream management
  

Infographic - time management survey

So, if not tracked properly, accurately, and in a timely manner (our survey found 44 percent of organizations track time daily, and another 44 percent do so weekly), wasted time has a negative effect on an entire organization’s bottom line. That’s why automated time tracking has become a priority for many managers who need to better forecast how time is best allocated across projects, and that the actual tracking of time is a seamless process so they can save, and not spend more time every day trying to capture time.   

Download an infographic of the survey findings or read the press release for further information. Or download the full survey results for a full picture of the data. 

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