The Tracking of Time

In the years that I’ve been involved in working inside major corporations and managing my own business, there are common themes that continue to resurface.  The first is that in order to manage a company or department as efficiently as possible I need as much information as possible about what is going on.  In order to gain this information I need employees that can not only perform their daily duties but that can also communicate with me daily on what they are doing and how things are going.  There is a very fine line however, between me having enough information to properly manage, and the employees being required to perform so many extra steps in their days that they become less productive.

So the objective, and point behind Lizzy’s training in this area, has been to allow her to close this gap of communication, but in ways that allow your employees to continue to do what they were hired to do, and yet provide you with all the information you demand.  How far you take this is completely up to you, but in today’s entry I’m going to explain in detail the concept behind Lizzy’s ticketing system and how you can utilize it to track as much as you’d like.

In her current version, Lizzy knows how to track and manage information from CRM to PDM and will soon be doing even more.  Her goal as a communicator is to afford your employees the simplest and shortest learning curve possible, and yet still provide as much flexibility as you require to run and manage your business.  To do this, we’ve introduced the concept of a “Ticket” throughout her interface that you and all your employees will work with for the purposes of tracking time.  Obviously the CRM module also has telephone calls that are tracked and logged as well, and they don’t really fit into this article so I won’t be talking much about them.  

The idea behind a Ticket is that anything that you’d like to track time against must have a Ticket.  This ticket can be billed against the employee by simply creating the ticket on their CRM contact record, or they can be billed against individual contacts by having the Tickets created on a specific contacts record.  The common “Ticket” theme can be found throughout Lizzy’s interface and is even seen in the PDM system when a developer or engineer has to perform some revision or update.  

The idea here, is that by using a common term for the process of tracking time and resources, we’ve eliminated the users of Lizzy from having to learn multiple systems to perform their daily duties.  By simplifying their learning curve and their involved processes, it’s much more likely that they will easily follow the rules and you’ll continue to have the information you need to run the business.  

Processes inside any efficient business must be setup in a way that they can be followed on the busiest of days.  If they can’t, then it will only be a matter of time before they will not be followed at all.  Lizzy strives to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Examples:

So lets say you need to have an employee responsible for contacting all your past customers and making sure they are happy.  This requires no ticket because their time will be tracked while making phone calls.  This keeps the employee’s processes to a minimum while still capturing the information we need.

Lets say you have an employee that you’d like to perform some  service for a customer, but one that does not specifically require time on the phone.  Such as data cleanup, building up a quote, doing inventory or whatever else you need done.  All of these additional types of service, all require a ticket in order for Lizzy to track them.  You can think of having a department where you write on a slip of paper what you want each employee to do and they grab their slips and go to work.

These Tickets allow the employee as well as yourself to add notes, attach files or communicate directly with the customer if needed.  Time can be started and stopped as much as needed and once finished the employee has the option of completing the Ticket or sending it to the manager for review.

All tickets assigned to any employee are found under the “My Tickets” menu option in both CRM and PDM Modules, and communication between departments is kept simple since everyone in the company works off Tickets.  Tickets created in CRM and later pushed into PDM will contain the same Ticket number to keep track of all time logged and all notes that got added along the way.

So while all systems have some sort of time tracking process involved and some actually have stand alone time tracking modules, we at Nizex.com see time tracking as such an integral part of running a business that Lizzy has it built into every aspect of her being.

To get more information on working with Tickets see the training videos in the respective areas of Lizzy’s interface.

–glenn hancock