Let's take a simple example. Let's consider the present act of your accessing this page. In a simple view of the universe let's assume there are two stakeholders involved - you and me. What we want to take away from this act is quite different. You are interested (hopefully) in reading this page, while I would love to gather some information about your visit which I can use as feedback information. For example, I would love to know which part of the world you came from, how many pages did you visit, what is your screen resolution, which browser are you using etc. Just imagine if I had intercepted your visit with a form wanting you to enter these information before I let you access the page. I am sure, you would have left some flowery words on my guest book :D

Does it mean that if the objectives of stakeholders don't align then keeping all of them happy is not a possibility? Let's relate this to the problem of capturing time. Assuming a typical organization, the process of time tracking has many stakeholders, some of them being - a)Project Manager - who (hopefully, ideally) should be able to analyze the time spent vs estimated time and use that as a feedback to find areas of improvement b) Organization - uses the time captured for invoicing etc. c) User - enters the time spent in the tool. The maximum number of users who feed critical information into the system are the users. However, in terms of motivation, it's the organization who wants the information the most. I have never seen (in my limited view of the world) a project manager use time tracking as a feedback mechanism. For the users it's a waste of time which needs to be endured as a part of existence. This lack of motivation manifests every week as the list of delinquents who failed to fill in time for last week.

Is there a way we can improve the situation? The logical (theoretical) answer is yes - by motivating the users. Means of motivation take many forms, cajoling, incessant reminders, escalations, factoring in delinquency as an attribute of appraisal. Simplifying the tools and making procedures simple can also help. Why is it that we come across the former means ever so often? Extracting information from a user base becomes progressively difficult as more of the following factors coalesce.

• Direct and tangible benefit (to self) that the user gets by providing the information. I will define "benefit" as something which makes the user's life 'less painful'. So benefit might mean the simple joy of warding off the incessant reminders or can also mean enjoying the process. The former is a way of avoiding pain, the later a mean to get more happiness.
  
  
• Intrusiveness of the tool used to capture information. There are some tools which would just barge in into your life and not leave till they have gouged the information out. "I will not let you read this till you register" - Bah
  
  
• Volume of information requested by the tool. A registration process, which captures only your user name and password (other demographics captured when the user invokes the 'Update Profile' use case of his own volition) is much more liked than the one which asks you for your date of birth, sex, age, color choice and on an on.
  
  
• Intuitiveness of the user interface. I have used tools which take you through three different pages and at least 10 mouse clicks and keyboard entry before it lets you add a work item.

This was a simple case where all of the information could be derived by the system and user participation was not required. In most cases this is not valid. A system needs user input because it possibly can't deduce the information by itself. I remember installing a version of Linux once (Caldera, I think), which presented me with a Packman game when the OS was being installed. It would pause the game and present me with questions that needed my input and then revert back to the game. An amazing experience. One of the (mandatory and boring) e-Learning courses raised its popularity by presenting joyful puzzles and 'did you know' snippets randomly amongst the chapters.

The purpose of this elaborate blog is quite simple. If a tool or a process has to gather information, it needs to be humble and realize that in most cases the users of the tool or process are not the direct beneficiaries.

This philosophy would form the core of the time tracking system :D