Accounting for time costs and work performed for a programmer - benefit or harm?

Question

Project management

Hello, dear forum users!
One of my acquaintances, the head of a small
software development company,
was very interested in such a topic as accounting for the work performed and the time spent on development (using well-known corporate software with the letter "B").
In general, the leader has energy and enthusiasm, but he himself has never been a developer, and he imagines the creative activity of a programmer very vaguely.
I want to explain to him that accounting methods suitable for planned work (such as "digging from the fence to lunch") can hardly be used to evaluate creative activity, and the introduction of such practices can do more harm than good.
The manager honestly admitted that he did not yet know what result the time data would give him, but said that he wanted to see what it would lead to (he used the phrase "I want to collect analytics").
If you have links to articles or books (in Russian) that reveal the essence of this topic,
please share.

Answer 1

There are no links and articles, but there is life experience. And this will lead to the fact that projects will be delivered with smaller deviations in cost and time (since planning will take place with better quality) and cheaper production (when there is greater specialization and tasks like, as you put it, R&D will first go to designers, and then for programmers, while the cost of programmers will fall).
I don’t understand where the creative component is in programming? With the right organization of work, this is a normal job.

Answer 2

I'm not sure about software with the letter B, but there are examples of successful companies that use time trackers, and those that don't.
What they use it for, I don't know.
An example of one of the companies that keep track of time is Jetbrains.
In principle, I don’t see anything harmful in the very fact of time tracking, the main thing is that the manager understands that the developer does not write code 100% of his time.

Answer 3

Do you work on Scrum?
add planning and grooming to your process with relative storypoint scoring

Answer 4

I'll be brief as I tap on my smartphone.
A fresh and affordable medicine to treat your pain is posted on page 5 of the corporate weekly newspaper Vesti KAMAZ #2(4024) dated 01/29/2021.
And there are about a dozen similar ones on a given topic.
Do not thank, because it is imprisoned for this vector, like your familiar boss :-)⁹