Managing a team of WordPress developers can be tricky. Projects often have tight deadlines and evolving requirements—both from your clients and the WordPress ecosystem. However, there are lots of ways of dealing with these challenges—with one of the best ones involving time tracking software.
Tracking time can let you see where developers spend their time and how productive they are throughout their work. This will help you with planning—enabling you to stay on schedule more easily. This guide will explore the variety of ways time tracking benefits WordPress developers, and how you can use such apps in your team. But before we explore effective strategies for tracking developer time with a specialized tool, let’s cover some key challenges of developing for WordPress.
Understanding the Key Challenges of WordPress Development
WordPress development has unique challenges that can slow down your projects—especially if you’re not prepared. Chief among these are:
- Changing Requirements
- Scope Creep
- Ensuring Compatibility
Let’s cover these in-depth, starting with the first one.
Changing Requirements
One of the biggest challenges of WordPress development is evolving requirements. This can be especially difficult if you’re working on a custom theme or a theme-related plugin. Customers may want changes done to various design elements at any point in the development process. This highlights the importance of using agile development strategies, which we’ll cover more in-depth a bit later.
Besides shifting client needs, WordPress projects will often need adjustments to be compatible with the platform’s latest versions. The CMS has been getting periodic updates ever since it came out. Each new revision fixes security issues and expands its functionality, highlighting the importance of keeping up with it—no matter how challenging it may be.
Scope Creep
You’re likely quite familiar with the concept of scope creep. But, just in case you aren’t—it happens when a project’s functionality grows exponentially from what was planned originally. For example, your client might request a WordPress theme with six unique page designs at first. This may later grow by more than double as the project progresses. Besides the quantity of deliverable items, scope creep could also affect their quality—requiring your staff to spend more time to integrate more functionality.
Ensuring Compatibility
As mentioned previously, compatibility is a major consideration for WordPress developers. But, besides being compatible with the latest version of the CMS, your projects must also work well with third-party themes and plugins. WordPress is an ecosystem of endless theme and plugin options, after all.
Your developers will need to spend quite a bit of time testing to ensure your projects don’t override important data of other plugins or themes. You’ll also have to make sure that no plugins and themes can break your project’s functionality for any reason.
How Time Tracking Can Boost the Productivity of Your WordPress Developers
Time tracking is a simple but powerful tool. It can help you track the work of your developers—ensuring their productivity and that they don’t waste time. While there are endless ways a time tracker can benefit your staff, we’ll take a look at the following:
- Managing Projects
- Prioritizing Tasks—Especially for Agile Development
- Managing Time Effectively
- Enhancing Collaboration
Managing Projects
Managing your projects correctly is important in achieving success—no matter what you’re working on. High-quality time trackers can help with this immensely, allowing you to ensure your projects make progress. Such functionality will help you allocate resources correctly so that none of your projects end up being late. A lot of the best time trackers even allow you to manage tasks as part of their project management tools, which has lots of benefits of its own.
Prioritizing Tasks—Especially for Agile Development
Managing your team’s tasks is the first step to prioritizing them correctly. While this is always important, it can be especially vital for agile development strategies. You undoubtedly know what agile development is, but if you don’t—it’s a more adaptable way of developing software.
One of the key results of using such strategies, like Scrum or feature-driven development, is the need to have lots of tasks. Instead of doing everything in one go, your team will need to complete their projects step-by-step. Each stage of development will then need to be followed by testing, debugging, and other similar stages. By managing each of these as tasks in a time tracker, your team can move forward faster. You’ll also be able to track how long each cycle takes to ensure your staff aren’t stuck at any point.
Managing Time Better
Knowing how your developers spend their time can help you improve their focus. High-quality time trackers with app and website usage monitoring features will allow you to detect distractions for your team. You can then take steps to make sure your developers don’t get distracted, which you can do in lots of ways. An example of this is automatic reminders that warn employees against spending time on non-productive platforms. However, only a few high-quality time trackers offer this functionality.
Improving Collaboration
Time tracking helps teams work together more effectively. These apps make it easy to schedule collaborative working sessions in your team, like meetings or discussions. Close collaboration is especially important for agile development strategies, which you’re likely using for your WordPress projects. Managing your company’s tasks and projects in one place can contribute to this massively as well.
How Time Tracking Simplifies Your Company’s Management
Time tracking doesn’t just help developers. It can also make overall management easier by simplifying a variety of key things in your business. Before closing off this article, let’s briefly explore a few examples of these as well.
Some of the most important management features of high-quality time trackers include:
- Leave and Holiday Management
- Company Finances
- Shifts and Attendance
Leave and Holiday Management
Managing your team’s days off is important to ensure a healthy work-life balance for them. Overworking can be a serious problem for lots of professionals—including developers. Time trackers can help you with this by simplifying the process of requesting and approving leave. Of course, you’ll have to use a high-quality time tracker that offers this functionality. But, once you have such an app in your productivity toolkit, your management efforts will be simplified.
Company Finances
Your company’s finances play a vital role in its success and involve a variety of considerations. These include items like payroll and operational expenses, which you’ll have to pay careful attention to. Time trackers can help here with dedicated features like WebWork’s Payroll and Expense Tracking. Lots of other apps offer such solutions as well, which will make it easier to keep your business spending in check.
Shifts and Attendance
While most businesses don’t need to manage shifts, many development firms do—to employ international professionals effectively. Overseas talent can open lots of opportunities for your business, but it comes with its own challenges. Fortunately, controlling these with a time tracking app can be easy. High-quality trackers will also let you ensure the punctuality of your team, which can play an important role in your company’s success—especially in the long term.
Final Thoughts
Time tracking has many benefits for WordPress developers and managers alike. It can give you clear insight into project timelines, task progress, and more. With time tracking, you can manage lots of common challenges of development—like evolving needs and scope creep—effortlessly. Time trackers will also support teamwork and better communication in your firm, helping your business deliver high-quality products.