Summary
This session will detail how we are capturing metrics on product development and resource allocation. We will discuss how we are capturing people’s time on task to get us to a standard set of recipes that we can use when planning and budgeting for new products. We will discuss how we captured and identified tasks that could be handled by a 3rd party offshore vendor to free up our in-house designer who needs to be focused on strategic and innovative work.
Key Insights
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Early budget tracking relied on fragmented Excel files per chapter and vendor, causing data duplication and delays.
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Design budgets often fluctuate due to evolving project scopes, like adding videos or accessibility adjustments.
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Smart sheet templates link asset logs with invoice sheets using coded complexity metrics to automate budget calculations.
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A combined invoice report provides design managers a real-time, consolidated budget view across multiple grades and vendors.
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Resource planning improves when task-level allocations are tracked rather than whole projects, revealing workload peaks and valleys.
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Designers’ workload varies widely during project phases, with some weeks showing 100%+ allocation and others near zero.
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Setting an 80% target allocation accounts for meetings, training, and breaks and helps avoid burnout.
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Toggle time tracking captured over 48,000 hours from 80 designers, enabling analysis of time spent per task and across grades.
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Transparency about time tracking helps reduce designers’ resistance and convinces them of benefits like workload management.
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Cross-team collaboration and shared templates with vendors standardize processes and dramatically improve invoicing efficiency.
Notable Quotes
"We didn't actually overspend our budget; the allocations simply fell short of our expenditure."
"Saying on budget is every project school, and when it comes to design, it can be the hardest."
"Sometimes people just needed to have the pain to understand the importance of doing something."
"If the project is 50% of the way through and we've used 50% of the budget, videos might be out of scope."
"Designers sometimes forget to stop the timer and it runs all night, which throws off the data."
"Energy management is so important, and tracking time shows designers where they spend their effort."
"Using smart sheet magic with formulas allowed us to connect data in ways we weren't able to before."
"Resource planning by tasks, not just projects, helps identify peaks where designers might be working overtime."
"We started with a piloted two-month time study before officially tracking time for a year."
"The goal was to capture what tasks designers spend their time on and how much time per task."
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