Software developer Atlassian, which owns Trello and Jira, will begin disconnecting accounts registered from Russia and Belarus. The company announced this in a newsletter for users a few days ago. What should those whose processes are related to these services do?

Hello everybody! My name is Sasha Kombarov and I recently transferred a team of 50 people from Trello to the domestic counterpart. I will tell you what problems we faced, what were the analogues and why you will never find the perfect tracker. In general, our personal experience. By the way, that is why we developed an add-on to the tracker: a system for calculating the performance of performers and projects – Reporter.

Prehistory

Since the company was founded in 2017 and until 2022, they worked in Trello – a simple and convenient task tracker. In Trello, you can create as many spaces, boards, and tasks as you want, add artifacts to tasks, checklists, and track task progress. But there was and is no consideration of time for tasks. Accordingly, the manager had to manually calculate the spent resources for each project, which took a lot of resources, which was always accurate, and it was impossible to view the report and the effectiveness of the projects at the moment. As the number of projects grew, they realized that it needed to be automated.

We have collected the main requirements that we want from the tracker:

• Kanban board;

• Materials and checklists can be added to the task;

• The performer can log time automatically and manually;

• Automatic calculation of planned and spent hours for the reporting period;

• Calculation of the effectiveness of completed tasks;

• List of completed tasks;

• Reports of performers during the day;

• Separation of access rights for managers and executors.

We started to put together services that could be suitable for us with Google tables. Tried YouTrack, Toggl and GanttPRO at various times. Did it not go in?

Moving to a domestic tracker

In March 2022, Trello lost the ability to add new users, and it became impossible to pay for foreign services with Russian bank cards. Because of all the tambourine dancing, the cost almost doubled.

In the same 2022, there were the first rumors that services for Russian companies would be turned off, so they decided to look for domestic alternatives. The choice fell on Kaiten, because it is one of our table that suited us the most.

I will say right away that we did not collect all the things and moved to a new tool as a whole company. First decided to test it with a team of volunteers, moving their work to Kaiten. Once we were sure that the guys could use the required functions and were comfortable, we pulled up all the other teams.

You can import cards from Trello or Jira into current statuses, and then attach performers to them in a few steps:

Yes, we moved, let’s move on 🙂

Organization of team work

For each project, we have a separate project group led by a manager. But what is important, the manager can manage 4-5 projects at the same time.

To visualize this, we created separate spaces in Kaiten for each project. All these spaces were created according to one template:

• On the left of the space there is an “Info” board, the cards of which contain all the information about the project with links to documents and other necessary files.

• Next to it is “Task” – the main board of the project team. According to all kanban canons, tasks move in stages from left to right. These are the columns: “Queue”, “Executing”, “Under review”, “Checked”. For each iteration, we made separate tracks so it is much easier to track the performance of the work.

• On the right was the “Archives” board. In Kaiten, you can archive cards so that finished tasks do not take up space on the board, but are stored in a special place in the space. The team and I made a separate board, which we also called the archive, to more conveniently interact with the completed tasks. Completed cards sit on it for a while before automatically flying away to the space archive.

Inside the cards, we use almost all available fields to describe the task, visualize all the important information and avoid redundant communications. For example, we always set the size of the task, put labels, write a description of the task, specify a deadline, add participants and assign a responsible employee.

I will note the checklists separately. The card can contain several checklists at once. Some of them can be templated, some guys create a personal need individually for each task. For example, one checklist describes the business logic of how a task should be done, and the other is a test case that governs the tester’s interaction with the developer.

To make it convenient for the manager to manage all his projects, he can switch between spaces using the side menu. Thus, with one glance at the board, it will be clear at what stage the task is, what a specific employee does and how the checklists are closed.

By the way, we use user groups to regulate access to different spaces. For example, if a new manager came to us, it is enough to add him to the admin group so that the new employee automatically gets access to the necessary spaces.

The most important function is the time tracker

Timekeeping is a function for the sake of which this move to a new service began. It was vital for us to record the time of work on tasks to make the process transparent, and later to understand the profitability of projects and the efficiency of employees.

Inside the card, there is a special field where we set the size — we indicate the number of hours the employee has planned for solving the task.

As soon as the task is started, the performer starts the timer and writes in a special field what he was doing at that time.

I will mention one point right away – it is very important to agree with team members that they mark their real time of working with tasks. The guide should make it clear that you are not playing FSB or Big Brother agents for total control or punishment.

Your goal is to build a transparent and convenient workflow in order to correctly balance the workload between employees and earn more.

Later, all this is formed into a report on the actual time spent. I or the project manager can look at the report at any time and analyze how much time was spent on a particular task or the project in general. For example, if we initially planned 100 hours, but ended up working 130, then something went wrong – the project is unprofitable, there are problems in the work, or the employees worked inefficiently, etc.

In addition, such a detailed record of time helps to estimate how many resources we spend on typical tasks. Therefore, if the next time we perform a similar task on this or another project, we will be able to accurately estimate its size.

Inside the card, you can see whether a specific employee has worked the standard number of hours for a week and what exactly he did.

Reporter – what are you?

Even a year ago, performers sent daily reports to the manager via messenger. Now it even sounds wild, but we were sure that the time would definitely not be lost, plus it disciplined our colleagues.

Kaiten has automated this a bit, all you have to do is go to the dashboard and copy the tasks.

I was preparing a description of tasks for our small service, which would allow viewing reports for each day on one page, tracking the effectiveness of projects and performers. This would avoid sending daily reports.

But we have an intermediate stage. One of the developers integrated with Kaiten and made a report page for each day. He named it succinctly – Reporter. I liked 🙂

We decided to first use “programmer design” and generate the reports we need as soon as possible, and then refresh both the design and the front.

Despite the fact that the timer itself is conveniently arranged in Kaiten and all data is collected in various types of reports, we lacked convenient visualization. It was confusing to load reports into Excel and manually extract the necessary data.

And if we are developers who wanted to automate everything to the maximum, we decided to adapt the reporting system to ourselves (good thing Kaiten has an open and quite convenient API). That’s how the Reporter special plugin appeared.

What kind of beast is this Reporter and what can he do?

1. Form a report during the day on the selected employee.

The plugin uploads data from Kaiten and shows all the employee’s hours spent and comments about them in one click. The report is available to both performers and managers.

2. To show the performance of the performers in percentages.

On this page, the manager or I can track the relationship between the planned and actual time spent by the employee. You can view data on all projects or select one specific one. The report also shows how many hours the developer was active in the service.

3. Form statistics of all employees.

For example, how many hours they worked on a particular day or to view detailed information about each.

5. Show general statistics about the project.

Reporter retrieves data from all tasks in the project space and compares plan and actual by planned and spent time per project. It also shows progress in the project – how many tasks are in the queue, in the works and ready.

Well, how come without a dark theme, many people appreciated it.

Reporter helped request the process of collecting data about work on projects, which in turn led to increased performance monitoring within the team.

Our interim results

Sometimes I read stories about teams rebelling when management asks them to track time. In these cases, it seems to me that the issue is not in the tool, but in its correct use and moral training of employees. Personally, we approached the issue of moving seriously and prepared the ground for the team to make it easier for the guys to adapt:

• Talked to the team and explained why we need to take time into account and how it will improve the web studio.

• We wrote the rules of operation in the new tool and talked about the main features.

• Made a small own FAQ and held several meetings to work out the questions.

Of course, we didn’t do without rough patches either – it’s impossible to get used to something new without them. But they became the impetus for the development of Reporter, which made the work process easier and more transparent.

A year after switching to the tracker, I can confidently say that it was the right decision – we grew by ~ 30%. The quality of assignment and task control has become higher. We understand where and how much time is spent on the project. This data helps you track how much resources are actually being spent on development and make a prudent assessment of your capabilities. Thus, we can more accurately set the terms of work on the project and not be afraid of facaps.

Well, one more conclusion – don’t chase after two birds at once 🙂 Choose what is more important to you, and then choose the service. It’s best with an API so that you can expand it for yourself after some time.

Moved from Jira or Trello? What task/time tracker do you use? Do you consider efficiency and profitability?

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