Developer productivity tracking

There was a project I was working on where management wanted us to track every piece of work in Jira. I want to share my experience about this. In one of my previous jobs there was a new project being started. It was actually a rebuild of the current product, so company and employees knew exactly what to build, but this time smarter and better. They had good people, good vision and openness to new innovative ideas. They also wanted to track the productivity of the whole team. I’m sure this was in a good manner, just to see where we spend time and how can we improve it in order to get the work done better and faster. So management instructed employees to track every bit of their work in Jira. Everyting you spend time on during the day needs to be in a Jira ticket so everyone sees where exactly we spend the time.

In the beginning everyone was a bit skeptical but positive to the idea. We gave it a shot. It turned it was complicated to track all the stuff and it was quite a big of time waste itself to track the time spent. In my opinion it was a good experiment, but it turned it it’s not at all productive to track the 100% of the team productivity. As usual in life, you need to find the right balance of what’s useful amount of productivity tracking and not to choke the team with it.