How do you track time spent on communication by the team?

[anastasia_burdiuzha]

Hello dear Atlassian community!

I'm wondering how you organize tasks in Jira for agile teams. In particular I am interested in time which the team spends on communication for daily calls, 1:1 meetings with the technical lead, etc, in the framework of the project. Do you create a separate jira ticket for them or team members track this time in the technical task which they are working on right now? 

Thanks in advance for your answers!

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @anastasia_burdiuzha and welcome to the Community!

While naming tracking time and agile teams in the same sentence is a bit like cursing in church, I do understand that teams want to build confidence by tracking where they are spending their time.

As you indicate in your question, time in Jira is indeed tracked against issues. So where you track the time boils down to the way you want to get information from the work logs. You may ask yourself (and your team) the question if it is important to know how much time in total was spent on the technical task itself. If so, and you consider meetings part of that time, than logging work against that technical task makes total sense.

Many meetings, calls etc span multiple tasks or aren't even related. If timesheet completeness is what you need, then having separate tasks for these supporting activities can be a good alternative. Which leads to the question if you should create separate tasks for every meeting, call, brainstorm session, ... Yet again, it depends what you want to know. If it is important to track the cost (in either time or budget) of a single meeting, create separate issues for those single meetings. If it is fine to have a bucket for all supporting activities, go with one single task. Or probably you'll find yourself and your team somewhere between those two extremes.

Hope this helps!

[anastasia_burdiuzha]

Many thanks for the answer @Walter Buggenhout! Good points!