Case Studies

QA Team Discovers that Understanding Time Produces Knowledge and Earns Respect

Jennifer is a manager of quality assurance at a large software company that develops enterprise applications. Her job is extremely demanding. Meetings, conference calls, work assignments, more meetings, document editing, brainstorming sessions, emails, phone calls, faxes. And then more meetings.

Why Intervals?

“Management would ask us how we're spending our time in QA (quality assurance). Before Intervals, we never had the right answer. Often times we had no answer. And that wasn't good.”

Jennifer realized she needed to track the time her team spent doing quality assurance. Intervals enabled her to do just that. She was finally able to track and analyze her team's efforts. And she discovered that her team was not spending all their time testing — but was also focused on other important tasks.

“For me, Intervals is great because it showed me and my team exactly where our time was going. It revealed how much time we spend in meetings compared to how much time we spend on testing and other responsibilities. Now, when I'm planning a project, I make sure my team is not overallocated on testing, and has time for their other work. And if the boss questions any of it, I can run a report in seconds.”

“Intervals is really easy to use — it's intuitive, it's well designed, and the help resources are there when you need them.”

Managing a QA Team with Intervals

For Jennifer, the two big benefits of Intervals are its reporting capabilities and its flexibility.

For our QA team, it's not so much about saving time as it is about understanding where our time is going. We tried other software before Intervals, but their time management features were unbearable. I used to have to spend large amounts of time managing my team's time — now Intervals practically manages the time for us.

If a higher-up comes in and wants to know why we need so many people on our team, or inquires about how log it took to write documentation for a product, we can quickly and easily justify our efforts with a few clicks. There's no more second guessing, no more protracted explanations. Intervals not only manages our time, it tracks it and gives us the data we need to provide clear and concise answers to questions from management.

“We're becoming more powerful and knowledgeable because we've discovered exactly where our time is going. Personally, I feel empowered. Intervals has given our team company-wide respect and credibility, something we didn't have before.”

Jennifer and her team still spend the same number of hours at the office, but those hours are more productive now that they know where their time is going, and how to be more efficient with it.