In a service orientated industry, it has been custom to measure input by way of timesheet to measure the cost of a project.
In today’s business environment where customers are frequently requesting quotes upfront, service providers must accurately estimate what time is expected to be spent on a project to establish a price to quote the client for the work.
While management may know what time should be spent on a project, there are several variables that affect the time spent on the project by staff.
Variables like, rest, personal issues, time of the day, distractions, politics in the office, internet speed etc all have an impact on the time spent on completing the project.
Any manager in the service industry will tell you that it is almost impossible for staff to meet all their time budgets on their projects that they are working on. Humans are not robots, and it is impossible for us to produce the same input all the time.
So instead of measuring the input that your team is putting into each project rather focus on the output that you expect from each team member to meet their salary costs each month.
If you were to say to a staff member that after completing their expected output in a month they could spend the rest of the month at home, how much more productive would they become.
Issues such as scope creep would be identified quickly as staff would no longer accept doing additional work for the same result. Overworking a project would be discouraged as deadlines need to be met irrespective of how long a staff member puts in to complete the project.
It would be important to breakdown projects into distinct tasks so that staff members are aware of what they are responsible for as well as matching the correct work to the correct skill level required to complete the task.
Once staff reach the point where they are completing projects/tasks equal to their salaries, and they take on additional work an employer could look to increasing their remuneration as an incentive to the staff member concerned.
Implementing this model will not be easy and will require by in from both management and staff but a concerted effort from management to make this work will result in increased production from staff and a substantial increase in profitability on projects.