Validation for a Late Night's Work - Effort Tracking and Estimation as a Tool for Effective Communication
08 Feb 2024
Goals, not deadlines
My final project group focused on creating a site for students to find information about clubs they were interested in on campus. One of the major problems we faced throughout the project's lifetime was the tendency to treat our major deadlines as one-and-done deals, instead of addressing them as persistent goals to work towards. To this effect, the process of effort estimation and tracking was incredibly useful for the most part, but could be occasionally deceiving.
Keeping hours equal across the board
I do genuinely think that being able to track your group's progress towards a collaborative goal on an individual scale tends to lead to a healthy working environment, so long as it is done correctly. I firmly believe that a compatible team will naturally split the workload amongst its members just about evenly, according to each member's skill level and interests. Being able to see each other's progress quantified as a discrete amount of time spent just goes to make this process easier. In my group's case, most of our members opted to participate in the optional effort tracking form presented by our instructor, but I was a bit caught off-guard to see that two of our most hard-working members didn't fill out the form. On paper, this would have no negative implications -- the un-tracked work they did would already be complete when they were finished, regardless of whether that work was documented.
Equating progress with time spent
In actuality, though, I think that the proactive lead they’d taken in starting the coding work early ended up slipping under the radar and being overlooked until closer to the deadline – a problem that could’ve been solved more easily using effort tracking (and maybe a little more proactivity on the rest of our parts). For me, there was a disconnect between hearing “I finished this task, and added these features to the backend”, and seeing the actual hours my group mates put in. I’d argue that being able to see each other’s overall hours at the end of a project milestone, while intrusive at times, would help us to understand each member’s working tendencies going into the next goal. </p>
Self-discipline and the tendency to compare
It's also important to remember that issue-based effort tracking presents its utility in the form of a collaborative goal, and not as a comparative standard. Group members must see issue tracking as a tool to further their cooperative efforts, and not as a point of judgement against their peers (especially when the work hasn't been done yet). I struggled with this idea somewhat and often had to resist the urge to modify my working hours after-the-fact to better match my peers'.
Conclusion
Effort Tracking is a great way to boost cohesion between a group’s members when working towards a collective goal. Being able to see peers’ contributions can be helpful and motivating, so long as it isn’t seen as an obstacle. I’d recommend using effort tracking when a team is confident in their goal-setting abilities.