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SEPTEMBER 23, 2004
By Burt Helm Software That Knows Your Every Move It's called Worklenz, and it can be a powerful management tool for tracking projects and people -- or a scary Big Brother Look busy -- Worklenz is watching. Designed by privately held information-technology company Métier in Washington, D.C., Worklenz is software designed to help companies manage large projects and maximize efficiency. But unlike an enterprise resource program, which tracks a company's inventory, invoices, and assets, Worklenz tracks workers -- what they do, when they do it, and how long it takes. And it's spreading fast. Métier says it has been profitable for just over two years and has won contracts with Lockheed Martin (LMT ), BMW, Northrop Grumman (NOC ), and the U.S. Agriculture Dept. In the next week, BusinessWeek Online has learned, Métier will announce a contract with the FBI to manage all of the bureau's IT-related projects. In its essence, Worklenz uses an extreme form of micromanagement to help a company make broad decisions. The program can sync with each employee's Microsoft Outlook e-mail account, Microsoft Project scheduling software, and his or her PeopleSoft timesheet, to let a boss see everyone's schedules, what tasks they're working on, and how soon each employee will complete his or her work. AUTOMATIC PADDING. Managers can use the program to instantly schedule meetings (Worklenz lets your manager access your Outlook calendar and pencil in meetings for you). But Worklenz can go far beyond that. It also allows managers to analyze each employee's efficiency on different tasks and select the best, most available person for a job. Worklenz can then predict when an employee will finish the task -- and on average it's 27% more accurate than the employee's own prediction, says Métier CEO Douglas Clark. "We have a developer here," says Clark, who has fully implemented the program in his own workplace, "who always pads his estimates so he finishes ahead of schedule. [Using the historical data] we automatically pad his pad." Not every company that uses Worklenz, however, is totally gung-ho. When Sean Noonan, IT manager for BMW's vehicle plants in the U.S., Britain, and South Africa, initially adopted Worklenz, he says his developers were opposed to it. "People don't like to have the administrative burden of having to record their time, [and they were] a bit concerned about the level of transparency." "BIG CULTURAL CHANGE." To assuage those concerns, Noonan uses Worklenz mainly to identify bugs in the computer system, based on what kinds of problems his help desk most often responds to. He says since his IT group is fairly small (about 50), he already knows each programmer's specialties and doesn't need the software's performance-evaluation capabilities. He has also decided not to integrate it with other systems but use it as his primary timesheet program. So far, Worklenz is in use only at BMW's plant in Spartanburg, S.C. Noonan says it won't be implemented in Germany, where this type of detailed timekeeping is seen as too intrusive. Dan Stoltz, the Agriculture Dept.'s Capital Planning & Investment Control Team leader, says implementing Worklenz has greatly helped his team fulfill the governments stringent requirements, as laid out by the Office of Management & Budget, which caused a "big cultural change" in his workplace. Agriculture uses Worklenz to manage all of its IT projects, which Stoltz estimates spans roughly 60 major projects and involves 800 to 1,000 people.
BW MALL
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