Where does your team's time go? Map it in one week
Before you automate anything, you need to know which work eats your hours. Here is how to map it in one week.
Ask a business owner how many hours a week their team loses to work nobody really wants to do, and you usually get an estimate. Ask again a week later, after the team has actually tracked it, and the answer is almost always higher.
That is because small work is invisible. Ten minutes here, half an hour there. Nobody plans it, but it happens every day.
Start by measuring for one week
You don't need expensive software. A shared document is enough. Ask everyone on the team to note down, for one week, whenever they do something that:
- always goes the same way,
- requires no real decision,
- keeps getting pushed back because something is always more urgent,
- or that they would rather have someone else do.
Have people note what it was and how long it took. Nothing more.
What you usually find
In software teams, we keep seeing the same kinds of work come back:
- Maintenance that gets left. Updating libraries, fixing warnings, cleaning up old code.
- Small bugs. They are not urgent enough to get priority, but they cost customers frustration and your team time.
- Writing tests. Everyone knows it has to be done. Few people enjoy doing it.
- Documentation. Whoever wrote the code knows how it works. The next person doesn't.
- Small internal tools. An export, a link between two systems, a report that is now done by hand.
From list to choice
After a week, you have a list. Add up the hours for each type of work. Then look at two questions:
- How many hours does this cost per week?
- Could someone else do this if they were given clear instructions?
Work that costs a lot of hours and is easy to describe is where you win back time fastest. That is exactly the kind of work AI coding agents are good at today, provided a person reviews the result.
Include the review time
This is where many calculations go wrong. When an agent carries out a task, someone on your team still has to review and approve the result. That time is not zero. An honest calculation subtracts that review time from the time saved.
Want to work it out yourself? Use our time savings calculator. Or book a free conversation and we will do it together with your figures.