Timesheets in Agile: GET RID OF THEM

Jeff Sutherland, the co-founder of Agile and Scrum, once said the first thing he does coming into a company as CTO is eliminating timesheets.

Dean Leffingwell, the founder of the Scaled Agile Framework, has also said to get rid of timesheets, Scaled Agile even includes “eliminating timesheets and projects” as part of implementing lean portfolio management. Leffingwell even says ‘the time filling out timesheets is time away from the code.’

Jeff Sutherland and Dean Leffingwell do not necessarily consider timesheets to be inherently “bad.” However, they do believe that timesheets can be counterproductive in an Agile environment and that there are better ways to measure progress, track work, and budget appropriately.

Timesheets can appear to be micromanaging to the team creating a distrustful, demotivating work environment. Team members learn faster how to game the system than work to produce an accurate timesheet that no one really wants to spend time filling out; they’d rather be coding. Let us also be frank, senior leaders will likely find excuses not to fill in their own timesheets carving out exceptions for themselves while insisting everyone turn theirs in with accuracy.

Accuracy with Timesheets

A study from AffinityLive in 2014, a company that specializes in professional services automation. Surveying 500 workers during the summer of 2014, the firm calculated that each person lost $50,000 per year in revenue due to insufficient tracking of…