I work for a tech outsourcing firm, but I’m fully-subcontracted to a Fortune 250. My company recently switched away from their home-brew time tracking tool (which wasn’t completely terrible) to Workday. The transition was rough. You had to click several times to finish the process, and it was easy to miss. They’ve since changed the workflow, and it’s better, but the site is still laggy. Apparently, Workday is taking over the world, and this makes me sad. It’s not a great system.
The Fortune 250 recently wrote their own time tracking tool, and now I have to enter my time in this second system as well. It’s everything I’ve come to expect from an internal application written by #CorporateIT. It’s slow. Like, really slow. Every time you type a number, it does something in the background, so filling in project numbers takes several seconds. Entering a number for time takes just longer than you expect, so it’s constantly tripping you up. Did it take the number? Oh, wait, it did, and now I have 88 hours in the box. Today, it broke the tab key. So, you know that thing where you would hit 8 and then tab, five times in a row, and be done? Not happening. This is something that you get for free in a browser, which people rely on, due to muscle memory, and the way every other table-based UI works, like Excel. You have to purposely disable this behavior. This strikes me as bizarre, but I guess it doesn’t really surprise me.
I wrote attendance-taking software for my church, which we used for a dozen years. It had features we still miss now that we use one of the main church management software sites. And it was fast. Like, millisecond fast.
I wrote my own home-brew time tracking software for a previous company. The first version sucked. It was slow, too. But, after getting it “in the neck” about how bad it was, at one all-hands meeting, I took the initiative, spent a week re-designing the core of it, and made it fast. Really fast. I profiled it at literally 20 times faster. The owners were happy. And then I wrote a page to do two pivot tables for the time period, one by employee (to write paychecks) and one by customer (to write invoices), and the person who did both of those things was happy too. This saved her many hours every week. That was 11 years or so ago, and the last time I asked, they were still using it.
These systems aren’t really that complicated. This is a well-known problem space, which every company needs addressed. Why are they all so terrible? I think it all comes back to the basics. The people who have to deal with it are not the people designing it, or specifying it. Once a company is so big that this disconnect can happen, I don’t know how it ever gets fixed. I fixed my app because the owner said it sucked, and I fixed it. In a Fortune 250, no one who has the authority to say that the time-tracking app sucks will ever have to use it, or even speak to someone who has to.