I am the IT manager in a company having 30 people in the IT team. There are 3 major teams, each with 7 to 8 people, + few other smaller teams. Different locations, cultures and timezones.
Having progress issues with one of the projects, I am willing to improve the team efficiency.
Until now, we were using OpenProject for project management. It worked well, although the layout is not the best for task presentations.
Now, we decided to switch on Zoho, which is a paid product, offering some widgets like time tracking etc.
Currently, I am asking all team members to send me a daily email report of their activities. I am making a resumee and sending a general report to the senior management team so that they can have a general overview.
As we will use Zoho now, my idea was to stop asking them to send daily email reports, instead they need to report on Zoho by keeping their tasks updated on daily basis, so we can easily track what an IT did during its day.
Question: Is it better to ask the devs to continue sending the email by adding the amount of the working hours spent on every task, or to ask them to track hours using Zoho and rely on Zoho to assist me in tracking hours? Is the hourly base measuring applicable in IT?
In reality, the reporting workflow of a developer will be:
- Update the status of the tasks assigned to me
- Enter how many hours did I worked on that task on a specific day
- Update the completion percentage of the tasks