Be the first to know about unusual behavior

You may have already heard our exciting news: we’ve just raised an additional $5 million in funding to supercharge your automatic time tracking. So, to start putting it to good use, we’ve just extended the capabilities of your AI – starting with a pretty cool update to team project management for Company plan users.

Here’s the deal: you can now see exactly where your projects are likely to veer off-course without actively doing anything yourself.

How exactly? Using AI, of course (note: this will become a recurrent theme). Timely’s AI can now actively flag any unusual project activity it thinks you might want to know about. Just head to the “Latest Activities” feed on your main Project “Dashboard” view to take a look:

Alongside your live project updates, you’ll see any inconsistent activities your AI wants you to take a look at. We call these “anomalies”. It’s anything Timely’s AI believes breaks with your team’s normal patterns of behaviour, which could threaten the course of your projects. These include when someone:

• logs hours to a project they are rarely active on
• logs too many or too few hours against their average; whether that’s per project, per day, or for a specific day of the week
• logs hours for someone else (if it’s an uncommon behaviour)
• logs too many hours against their weekly capacity
• breaks with their regular logging patterns (e.g. by logging hours for a day last month when they usually log hours every day, or by logging hours at the weekend)
• or when your team logs too many or too few hours to a project

The idea is to turn your AI into a briefing assistant, identifying threats and potential problems for you before they erupt — like employee burnout, disproportionate team workloads, logging hours to dormant projects, working over the weekend, or burning through a project budget unusually quickly. It’s all about guiding your attention to where it’s most needed to help you manage projects more proactively.

But it also represents something bigger: getting our tools to actively identify opportunities from our data, instead of just passively feeding us more information. This is a first step towards achieving that, and we’d love to know what you make of it; in particular, if there are any other critical activities you want your AI to highlight!

So, enjoy our final piece of AI goodness for 2018, and expect many more in the year ahead! 🎇