Recording your time

Everyone who works on a client project at dxw is responsible for recording the time they spend on projects. We usually work with our clients on a time and materials basis, so it’s important we can accurately track and report how our time is spent on client projects.

We use Productive to schedule our work, which helps us to forecast our capacity over future weeks and months in a reliable way.

We track our time at the same level of granularity that we bill it – for almost everyone in the team, that’s half days or whole days.

What to do when recording your time #

When recording our time, we follow these guidelines:

• If what was scheduled matches reality, simply confirm this time.
• If you worked on a named project (client or internal including “dxw Support”), that differs from the schedule, record your time as that.
• If you worked on something else, leave the time blank or zero out what you were scheduled to work on.
• If you were off sick or on leave, make sure this is recorded on BreatheHR and it should be automatically copied across to Productive.
• If you were away due to a regular day off, as part of your working pattern, leave the time blank or zero out what you were scheduled to work on.

If you’re not doing client work, then unless you’re working on one of a handful of named internal projects or support, you don’t need to record your time against any other piece of work – the assumption is you’re doing valuable work, whether it’s learning, helping with recruitment or improving our tooling and processes, and we don’t need itemised time tracking to justify that.

We’ve set up the platform, so that it understands individual team members’ working patterns. This means the team don’t need to worry about entering in their non working days.

Our delivery leads lend a helping hand when delivery team members aren’t sure how to record their time – they’ve been doing this for a long while and have a well developed sense for it.