Insights - Should be task based, rather than work based

  • 2 November 2021
  • 8 replies
  • 96 views

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

Dear karbon and peers, 

Currently, the insights are all work based, not task based. This is not working and not making insights helpful in real world team management. Work consisted of a lot of tasks completed by different team members. their performance on meeting deadline etc. are all task based, rather than work based.  Accounting firm ‘s team consisted different level of staff and normaly the work in charges are senior team members, for those supporting staff and junior team members, they are not work in-charge, their performance is mainly based on the data of task rather than the work. I trust a bookkeeper firm may has less feeling of this since they are most time contractor based and all the team member does the same work. But for a proper accounting firm, we have a vertical team (event it is flattened, we still have 2-3 levels, partner, manager/incharge/ preparer.  With current insights, we only can see the performance result of work assignee (normally in-charge or manager), but not the each of the team members. This makes the insights much less useful. 


8 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

Hi Mike,

I have not found insights to be helpful. I rely almost exclusively on kanban boards and budgets to track the work and to see where the bottlenecks show up.

Karbon is designed for a collaborative work environment with some accounting firms moving to 100% fixed fee and no time-keeping. They just track revenue per employee and focus on making the process smooth for internal staff.

Karbon is not designed to track each staff members moves and make sure that they are completing their individual steps on time. It’s designed to give a leadership team excellent visibility on their work flow and then zero in on bottlenecks and fix them for staff… at least that’s how I’ve used it.

What kinds of things does your firm track at an individual level?

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

Hi Max, thanks for the discussion. How you do performance management for the team and how you decide good performer in the team and poor performer in the team? Without the data and report, how a team member is assessed as good or bad? I am interested to know your model and process of staff performance management by using Karbon, or you use a different system to track that? 

My firm start very beginning set up as a fixed fee service accounting firm (of course, fixed fee for fixed scope, but as you know, the accounting service is not like a ISP or mobile phone plan, the scope is often extended the process, especially for consulting/audit/tax services) , so we only use time sheet to track the time cost for each of work. I am interested to know without time cost information, how you know and on what basis you charge client an overrun or extra fee for the extended scope, especially for those consulting/audit/tax advice type of work.

Userlevel 4
Badge +10

If you use time and budgets functionality in Karbon, you can allocate work items to different members of staff and monitor the time spent rather than tasks completed - although we have the majority of our clients on fixed fee, we still use timesheets to be able to keep on top of things.

I agree with Max that Karbon is designed for a collaborative work environment rather than monitoring how many tasks a team member has completed. Some work in Karbon has no tasks for us, other work pieces however, have sections of tasks allocated to different team members, from a Bookkeeper, to an Accountant to a Reviewer. But again, one task may take 1 minute to complete, another task may take 1 hour to complete. The question here is to make sure you set up the work in Karbon to correspond to the time and budget you have allocated for that client’s piece of work and allocated the right staff members to complete that work to make sure you fit in the time and budget. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

Hey Mike. I’ve been thinking about how to reply, and I’m not in a place to take the time I need to carefully lay out my answer to your question. You ask an important one, so I want to be thoughtful in my response.

Userlevel 1
Badge +1

Interesting question @Mike Liang, I also haven’t used the insights a huge amount, I prefer to go to the list level on the work board and focus on how many days it takes to turnaround work items etc over against narrowing it down into specific tasks.  I think our focus as a firm is the touchpoints with clients and so if we are turning around the work faster this is a sign the clients will be happier and our staff are doing a good job, if they are taking longer it’s time to question why that is the case..

Out of interest, in your Karbon account, would you have each task taking a similar amount of time to complete as I know for ourselves, some of our tasks could be completed in 30 seconds, others could take 30 minutes.  So for us having insights on a task level probably wouldn’t be very useful, but I’m always keen to learn of better ways and interested to have your take.

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

Hi Tom, when I say team performance evaluation, it means for each team members. Human is not machine and we cannot assume all the human in the team are having the same efficiency and having same level of proficiency and have same level of responsibilities. In real world, different team member has different performance result. We have a KPI and inventive plan for team. Most important KPI are quality and deadline meeting rate, and all are measured at individual staff level. Unfortunately, Karbon don’t have any report give us direct access to the result of the two KPI. For Quality rating, we require reviewer to mark a score for the work preparer. But there is no place at the moment in Karbon to do this. We have to invest a lot of time to have a walk-around. For deadline meeting rate, again, for a work in our firm, there are at least 2 team members involved. The work complete on-time rate in INSIGHTS only reflect the work assignee’s on time rate, not all the colleagues involved in the work. For example, if staff A is work assignee, and staff B is the work assistant. The staff A is really responsible and make the work completed on time (before the pre-set due date) by doing a lot work for Staff B, But staff B is not performing well and have a lot lateness in completion of his/her work though the whole work meet the deadline by the extra work done by staff A. We need the completion on time rate on task level, since that reflect actual situation. Hope this example will make myself clear.  However, I am open to hear about other peer firms, how you manage your individual staff performance? Based on what objective data you do performance rating on each individual staff? Or you don’t do it at all but have other better way of getting best out of staff at each individual level and having them perform at expected level consistently?

 

Userlevel 1
Badge

The data is there for tasks and you can pay for it using their ongoing service package.

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

@Alex Graniere  Thanks. Yes, I have already paid the ongoing service package. But the funny thing is that the data is only for uncompleted work, any work marked completed cannot be extracted to show the tasks in completed work. That is really unexpected and caused a lot thinking and efforts in finding get around, so far, I haven’t got one. I cannot afford to ask team to not mark the work completed solely for this reason….

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