Discussion on timesheets for non-developers

Ben Newport

I am trying to implement timesheets for all staff including non-development team

I am going to create a project called Timesheets (TIME)

The issues will be

• Sick Leave
• Annual Leave
• Internal Meeting
• External Meeting
• Marketing
• Legal
• Sales
• HR
• General Admin

This way i can start to see how much time the business, and each individual is spending in each area of the buisness. 

I am insisting that each member completes 38 hours each week. 

Id like to open this idea up for discussion to see if this is the best method to do this.

Eva Kasiak_q7mdx0

Hi Ben, 

many thanks for this discussion. I am currently running few Temo configurations with different clients (hence different specifics) and thought that will share my thoughts and experience. 

Generally speaking your approach may be good and it is always up from individuall specifics of the team and organization. However I would bare in mind work planning aspect too and some predictibility. 

What I mean specifically is this:

your team members no matter if they spend time in development or non dev tasks do work on specific projects and do belong to specific Teams (departments) 

each of them will be reporting time against the work progress inside of the project - that would seem reasonable as you want to see how much time person x burned in project a and how much time the same person might have spent in project b

any annual leaves, sick leaves etc. - can be managed from the timesheet calendar (i.e. Tempo have this option) so you basically create different types of calendars for example Holiday Scheme, or Sickness Scheme (off course this one hard to predict but when it happens you can update as soon as tyou find out that someone will be away for some time) , you can create team a scheme, or team b scheme

in those you will add who is available for how much time during a week, so if someone is working 38hrs/week then you add it there. this way you will start managing team capacity and time allocation. from there once you have this config done you will start seeing  velocity and capacity

the next thing is also that if you have Marketing or Legal then these are departments which most likely consist of few/several people - each person can be tracking his/her time but no under Marketing task, but under Marketing project - which has different configuration inside JIRA

So to summarize it what I would personally do is following:

• set up projects for each department in JIRA - determine if these are ongoing projects (then maybe use Kanban) or plannings and demos etc (then use Scrum for more dev teams) 
• under each project plan the work and tasks and assign to each person who will be working on it 
• configure Teams and Holidays Schemes, add each person availability during a week
• introduce time tracking cross organization - each department member is logging the work, making sure will add time spend, time remaining - and ideally on the beginning you also have original estimates, so you can start taking more meaningfull data from JIRA and convert it into different type of reports
• dive deep into Account based reporting, portfolio etc. - depending on the needs 

 

I hope this make sense and is helpfull, shout if you have any questions