A very competent writer gives a great explanation of the value of time tracking as a proxy for a financial measure in a balanced scorecard approach to managing a development business.

Financial: As high-level financial measures go, I have a pre-disposition to ROIC. It balances profitability with the investment costs required to generate it - and is a topic for another post. Most processes will not require this comprehensive of a measure, so simple cost tracking usually suffices. This can usually be further simplified to time tracking since development is largely made up of salary costs. Make sure you at least consider equipment and other capital and marketing costs before you settle in on time tracking as your financial measure. Normalizing financial tracking to earned value or planned spend helps to show tolerances of spend on a project (and display productivity with the financial measures.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 4:47 pm and is filed under PositiveWare, Project Management, Time Tracking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.