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    Category: Task managment

    • 5 Reasons Why Daily Group Reports Will Save You Time

      5 Reasons Why Daily Group Reports Will Save You Time

      Some people do daily reports to account for their time at work, some are proud to share their progress, and for some, it’s nothing more than an obligation. The reasons may vary, but the important thing is that it should work for you.

      For us at СleanTalk daily reports are a full-fledged communication channel, so each employee sends their daily report with the current day’s results and the next day’s plans to the whole team at once (we use Gmail + Google Groups for this). Yes, each employee gets about 20 report emails at the end of the day but it really helps to save time. Let us share with you how it works.

       

      1. Your report is opened by someone interested in it

      There’s nothing worse than wasting time on a report that isn’t useful. In a normal “vertical” reporting system, you and your colleagues end the work day by sending reports and plans for the next day to your team leader, and it’s nice if they have enough time to read and make sense of them. Also, it will be a great success if they are able to give feedback on them. With this system, the synchronization of the team members’ work lays entirely on the team leader’s shoulders who further distributes and monitors the tasks.

      With a horizontal reporting system (like ours), all reports end up in the same mailing list group in Google Groups. When employees work on the same product, they often know the details better than their team leader, that is what exact task should be paid the most attention to and whose attention should be prioritized higher based on their previous experience.

      2. You can adjust the plan of action better or correct a mistake in advance

      For example, when one team has to start doing a new part of the project, and the other team has not yet finished the required previous part. In this case, it will become visible in the reports and the workflow can be adjusted. That is, some of the issues can be solved at the planning stage before the actual implementation.

      If an error in the workflow could not be avoided, the earlier it is detected the less time it will take to fix it. For example, a backend developer can notice a possible error in the work of a frontend developer in advance and notify them. That will help in fixing the mistake quickly and time will be saved.

      3. This is a full-fledged communication channel on par with audio and video conferences

      In our team, on average, at least one dialog appears out of 20 reports, this happens almost every day. Part of our time is saved because the employee is not waiting for a scheduled online meeting to discuss a particular issue. Such reports are great for non-urgent tasks scheduled for the current day. However, if the task is urgent and needs to be solved quicker, an audio or video conference is more effective.

      4. Possibility of retrospective analysis

      You can always examine the history of reports on a particular task and evaluate what went wrong and what could have been done differently. Sometimes this may seem like a waste of time, but it helps to avoid such mistakes and save time in the future.

      5. The openness of information and team building

      When we say your report is seen by the whole team, it literally is without exclusions. This applies primarily to team leaders and CEOs. It’s always essential for employees to know what the company founder or their top manager is contributing to the product. Such a team leader will always earn more respect from their colleagues. Besides, when everyone sees each other’s contribution it is very important for team building and a cohesive team will probably show better results in the same amount of time than any other team.

      We hope this article helps start-up companies in saving valuable time. We were a small company once, we invented and tested various approaches to organizing reports and competent time management. Some of the techniques didn’t work for us, but we’ve been practicing this approach to organizing reports for a long time and are happy that it helps our employees save more time for their families and hobbies.

      Have a look at our experience how to organize task among team by using SCRUM techniques in Basecamp 2.

    • Implementing SCRUM Techniques in Basecamp 2

      Everyone who has worked with Basecamp 2 knows that it is a convenient, reliable and very simple tool for organizing tasks in small teams. Basecamp 2 is so simple that it does not contain such popular functions as Gantt Chart, estimation hours per task as well as does not have integrations with various third party services like github.com and etc. On one hand this method facilitates working with the product, performing really important functions such as creating tasks, commenting and organizing the tasks list, but there is a need to “finish” the Basecamp 2 system to meet the specific requirements of the team. One of such requirements in the CleanTalk company is supporting “sprints” (this term is from the SCRUM methodology) in the task management system, below I will tell you how we added these sprints to Basecamp 2 for managing our tasks.

      Organizing Sprints in Basecamp 2

      The steps are below:

      1. We create a separate project, give it a name relevant to the application and the function that your team provides. In my case, let it be “Web development”.
      2. Add a list of tasks. This list of tasks will be our sprint. In the sprint title we indicate its number, its due date and its status (Open or Closed).
        1. Example of such title: Sprint 1. Due date July 20 2022. Open.
        2. Open – notifies the team that it is still possible to add tasks to the sprint, Closed – the sprint is closed for new tasks.
        3. I recommend putting information about the status of the sprint in its title, as in this case when other tasks from other projects are about to be transferred to the sprint, you will see if your sprints are open or not in the titles of the to-do lists.
      3. In the description of the to-do list we add information about the utilization of available working hours in the team, taking into account the sprint length. Utilization allows scheduling the number of tasks that the team is able to perform based on the available working hours.
        1. Example: Utilization of sprint 80/113, Tanya 14/32, Dmitrii 14/32, Mike 31/32, Vitalii 14/28.
      4. Next, we follow the SCRUM methodology – we assemble a team and plan Sprint # 1.
        1. We estimate the hours among the team that we are going to spend per each task from the Backlog.
        2. We select the estimated hours from the Fibonacci series.
        3. The estimated hours are put in the title of each task. Example: Update Bootstrap for Dashboard (19/21). Where,
          1. 19 – actual hours spent.
          2. 21 – estimated hours agreed by the team.
      5. At the end of the sprint planning, we update the Utilization, see point 3. If the Utilization is 100%, we set the sprint status as Closed in the to-do list title.

      Calculation of Sprint Convergence

      When the current sprint is completed and the next one is being planned, it’s time to calculate the convergence of the completed sprint. Convergence will be considered by two parameters – the ratio of scheduled tasks to actually solved tasks and the ratio of estimated hours to actually spent hours. Example for Sprint #1:

      • Convergence by hours 124/113 = 110%.
        • If the convergence by hours is more than 100% it means that the team spent more hours on the tasks than was initially planned. In such cases it is necessary to understand what prevented the proper scheduling of the estimated time. If the convergence is less than 100% it means that something prevented some of the planned tasks from being completed.
      • Convergence by tasks 18/21 = 86%.
        • If the convergence by tasks is more than 100% it is an excellent result indicating that the team has planned the sprint qualitatively. If the convergence is less than 100% it means that the team should review what prevented the previously scheduled tasks from being completed. Determine the cause of the losses and take action to eliminate them.

      Conclusion

      By simple manipulations we managed to organize our work on tasks in Basecamp 2 according to the SCRUM recommendations. In addition, look at our experience how to use Daily reports to save time among team members.