Here at LunarLincoln, we have a unique work policy – 35 hours of billable time each week – do it whenever, wherever. And because we track work by hours logged to client tasks and not time spent warming your office chair, it’s important for us to have an easy way to do this – hence Hourglass.
We launched Hourglass last year because most of the add-ons in the store were just too heavy for what we needed (basically a button that started the clock) but in the meantime we’ve discovered one more feature that we thought would be handy dandy.
In the spirit of sharing our internal improvements with other teams through the Atlassian Marketplace, we are now launching a new feature for Hourglass – the “Currently Logging Time” Dashboard Gadget.
The Features
What does the “Currently Logging Time” Dashboard Gadget do? It allows admins to see what their team is currently logging time to – not only the time for the current timer session but also the previous logged time and current estimate for the task their working on. An admin can also select the task itself to go straight to the detail view for more information
Why we built the Hourglass Dashboard Gadget
- Estimate/Sprint Accuracy: Triage tickets with a team member before the time is blown.
- Decreasing interruptions: Never have to ask “Are you working on X right now?” ever again.
- Mentoring junior developers: If you see someone is currently working on a task that might be tricky or needs additional, recent information added – it’s easy to provide that update when relevant.
- More flexible scrum board rules: You no longer have to trust the “In Progress” column and can allow for multiple related tickets to all be “In Progress”.
- Overall visibility into the team’s activity without the need for “total” scrum boards.
Extra Settings for Big Teams!
While our team is relatively small (under 10 people), we also thought about how the Cloud service is quickly growing to larger teams, so we’ve opened up the ability to filter by people or groups in the gadget settings so that you can monitor only the QA Team or only the developers-in-training for example. As always there are some other polish pieces we chose not to include in this very first iteration, so please, please let us know if there is something you’re interested in seeing (it’s always great to get feedback and perspective into how other teams work).
Sound cool? We thought it did. Give Hourglass a try today and make sure to add this new gadget to your dashboard.