Another idea for you via Atlassian’s Jira and the Scrum processes we’ve adopted : tracking time to power project “Burndown” charts.

Estimating project effort as hours required to complete a series of tasks, and then doing daily standups to track progress against estimates (the essence of the Burndown process), drove our dev team to propose (and enforce) the logging of time against tasks without management input. Yep this was driven bottom up – with management support – not dictat.

Put another way, by making task tracking a team goal – demonstrating progress to one another – time tracking can be transformed from a bureaucratic management overhead to an interesting team and individual measurement process – with some cool infographics to boot.