timeop - diploma project presentation
DESCRIPTION
Workplace productivity is a key performance for any business employing knowledge workers. However, with the increasing amount of content made available online, computer users are often distracted from fulfilling their roles in respective business processes and are constantly drawn to unproductive, time-consuming activities. On the other hand, the resources needed for increasing amount of jobs often are online, thus making the restriction or complete banning of Internet access an unfeasible solution for business-owners and managers. Moreover, as shown in (Coker, 2009), allowing up to 15% of time for leisure browsing at the office can actually improve overall productivity by 9%.While other solutions for tracking worker activity exist, they often overload managers and system administrators with immense lists of visited websites for each user, making it almost impossible to discern who is productive and who isn’t. Moreover, existing solutions such as keylogging and screenshot retrieval often risk to needlessly sacrifice the users’ right to privacy in order to measure productivityTimeOP is built to automatically asses productivity over the whole set of used application, presenting only relevant data and conclusions to authorized parties. Additionally, user privacy is protected to a large degree since private content, such as passwords, typed text and conversations with third parties is never acquired, stored or revealed.Therefore, the presented solution does not disrupt the users’ workflow, protects user privacy, while providing managers, business-owners and even the users themselves with relevant conclusions and visualizations on productivity.Moreover, TimeOP aims at surrounding workplace productivity into a competitive metric, rather than just enforcing manager-surveys-employee mindset. As suggested in (Kompier Michiel, 1999), having a centralized surveillance authority in the workplace increases perceived stress and lack of privacy. Through various information sharing policies, TimeOP opens up activity data within the team environment, thus raising awareness without causing additional stress.The current thesis aims at analyzing existing solutions, emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses and building a solution which is qualitatively superior, focusing on solving specific real world problems. Ever since the beginning of the project, we have adopted an easily extensible architecture, so that TimeOP data can be securely made available to other services through a REST API. Realizing the importance of data privacy, a significant part of the development effort has been directed toward right management and sharing policies that guarantee complete isolation between independent users. In order to maximize the commercial potential of this project, the user management component has built-in support for handling subscription types, payment gateway instant notifications, and account upgrading and downgrading policies.In the rest of the thesis we’ll present the major components that allow for TimeOP business processes to run correctly.TRANSCRIPT
Author(s)
Politehnica University of
Bucharest
Automatic Control and Computers
Faculty
Computer Science
Department
TimeOP: Automated System for PC Activity
Tracking and User Productivity Analysis
Bogdan Bocș[email protected]
Bachelor Presentation Session - July 2011
Content• The Problem• The TimeOP Solution• TimeOP Architecture• Reporting Features• Implementation Challenges
– Data Acquisition– Billing and Payment
• Current Status• Conclusions
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The Problem
• Workplace distractions for employees using a PC
• Poor accountability for computer time at the office
• Decreasing productivity of “knowledge workers”
• Low efficiency in delivering tasks
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The Problem
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Equilibrium
15%
People who do surf the Internet for fun at work — within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office — are more productive by about 9% than those who don't.
The TimeOP Solution
• Measures time and involvement spent on applications (including web apps, pages)
• Classifies as productive / distracting
• Real time, non-intrusive, web compliant
• Integrates team and project management
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TimeOP Architecture
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C#
PHP PHP
MySQL
HTML5 CSS3
jQuery PHP
TimeOP Architecture
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Reporting Features
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Reporting Features
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Implementation ChallengesData Acquisition
• Detecting the active (“on top”) process
• Acquire active URLs from browsers
• Capture the title of the active window
• Count keyboard and mouse interactions12.04.2023 Bachelor Presentation Session - July 2010 10
Billing and Payment
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Accounts
PK AccountID
AccountName AccountHolderIDFK1 PlanID LastPaymentDate ...
Plans
PK PlanID
SubscriptionName MaxUsers Price DaysAvailable
Users
PK UserID
Username .... UserAccounts
PK,FK1 UserIDPK,FK2 AccountID
...
Projects
PK ProjectID
FK1 AccountID ...
PlansUpgrade
PK UpgradeID
FK3 AccountID TimestampFK1 OldPlanIDFK2 NewPlanID ExpiresOn ...
User Agent (Browser) TimeOP PayPal
Choose Subscription Plan Type
Redirect to PayPal
POST (HTTPS) PlanID to PayPal Checkout URL
Return Page with Subscription Confirmation, Price
POST (HTTPS) Name, Address, Payment Details
Redirect to TimeOP Upgrade Succesful Page
GET Success page Internal Operations
Return Success Page
POST (HTTPS) Payment Notification
OK
POST (HTTPS) Ask for Payment Confirmation
Granted
Record transaction, update account, email user
Billing and Payment
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Current Status
• 800+ users
• 14.000+ tracked hours
• 500 tracked hours a week
• Deployed on-premises on customers’ servers
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Current Status
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0 12 24 36 480
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
User Sign-up on TimeOP.com
Conclusions
• Effective tool for tracking staff performance
• Measuring involvement, not only time spent
• Web compliant, mobile compatible
• Innovative solution to an existing problem
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