Another way to record working time in Redmine

In this article we want to talk about the problem that many people face when managing their projects, and about the decision that came to us. The problem is the accounting and forecasting of working time when working on diverse tasks.

In our company there are several quite large projects that require attention. And it often happens that the same employees are in demand on different projects. Therefore, it is sometimes imperative to know how long a given task takes! In the digital business, this problem is particularly acute, because it is often difficult to make any predictions, for example, when important edits from the client come at the last moment.

We use the Redmine project management system in our company, which meets almost all of our requirements when working with projects. But one of the important drawbacks is that the time spent in tasks is set by the performers themselves, which does not always give an accurate picture of what is happening.
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In order to optimize the work of the whole team, we needed the preliminary estimate of the task execution time to coincide with the actual situation. After analyzing the statistics that we had, we decided that the allowable discrepancy between the estimate and the actual time spent was about 30%. If this indicator is exceeded, then you need to find out what the problem is.
Therefore, we developed a real-time timer for Redmine.

The Redmine desktop client application is now available for free to everyone after registering on the site. The interface is a timer with a list of tasks, its main function is time tracking. When you start work on a task, you need to start the timer by double clicking on the selected task in the list. Synchronization with redmine occurs every minute, so the recorded time is always relevant.

To connect the timer to your account in Redmine, you need to enter the server address and API key. The design is as simple and convenient as possible, here are only the most necessary functions:

• search by keywords and projects
• ability to add a comment to the task
• elapsed time

One of the convenient features can be noted pop-ups that appear every time you add a new task. And if you forget to turn off the timer, the program will note your absence at the computer and ask if you write down the idle time to the task.

Summarizing, we can say that such a timer allowed us to solve many problems within the company, see where our time actually goes and more efficiently allocate resources between projects. Download and test!

http://rmclient.org