I thought I would write about a useful feature we just added to our business automation solution.   It was an expansion on the time tracking functionality that we already had in our project management system (one of our enterprise 2.0 solutions) that was specifically geared toward businesses that need to account for all of their employees’ hours.  Not simply the fact that they were spent working, but rather what they worked on, who is the client, how much that client was billed for that work, ratio of billable work to bug fixes for every client, project, and feature, and so on.

What’s more, the employees and managers can actively monitor anyone’s progress and efficiency.  At the end of the month, a development manager can instantly get data on how quickly, efficiently, and bug free any given developers work is.   The per project information also helps determine which projects are more or less profitable, which in turn lets us determine which project should be looked into (if development and efficiency needs to be improved).

The last piece of the new functionality deals with performance bonuses.  The system is designed to automatically determine performance and show each employee if they have a good chance to receive a bonus for any given month (including the estimated bonus amount).  All settings dealing with what is a good/efficient month are 100% configurable and can be changed any time (depending on who is using the system).

This is saving Intechnic a lot of time in administrative overheads and it has given employees an additional incentive to do a better job.