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In my organization, we have tasks that are repeated in the same way for every project. I need to track the time the team or an individual has spent doing those tasks (i.e. the time between the moment the task was assigned and the moment it was completed), because we want to estimate how much time, on average, a project takes. This is important for us, because almost all of our projects have the same scope.

I've tried Basecamp, Redbooth and a couple of other project management tools, but there doesn't seem to be a way for extracting this data.

I know that I am supposed to track cycle time instead of time in task, but these projects are always running simultaneously and some of them are paused for long periods, so we are unable to know the total time spent on a project.

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  • Try "right sizing" your stories, and then count them. Multiply be the avg time spent on a story. You'll be amazed at how close to actual you will be.
    – Andrew Clear
    Commented Jun 17, 2015 at 16:56

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It's not the answer you want to hear I know. The odds of being successful with individual task time tracking is up there with cold fusion. It relies on the people doing the task to carefully track their time. Unless you're a law firm, then it's almost certainly not a discipline your team will have.

To answer the specific question, I'm not familiar with any time tracking tool that will get you this kind of detail. The individual would have to start and stop their time based on actual hands on keyboard and that isn't scalable or reliable.

It might do to step back and ask yourself some foundation questions. - What is driving the need to track project duration? - How is tracking at the task and not total project time going to help you? - What cause projects to be put on hold? Can hold time be tracked? - Can projects be serialized, with teams swarming one project to completion before starting the next?

This is more a conversation than a quick an easy answer. Feel free to ping me direct and I'm happy to help you through these questions.

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  • Even worse, after about 3 months of doing it, no one will trust the data anyways, because everyone will know not everyone entered it properly all the time. But you'll keep tracking hours for another 6 months or so before you give up entirely. Imagine all the effort and reputation points wasted.
    – Andrew Clear
    Commented Jun 17, 2015 at 16:55

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