Logging time (worklogs) for anonymous users or a group of users

[Tobias Zirzow]

Hello there,

I searched the internet, but I didn't find anything so I hope, you might help me.

We are using Jira for more than 400 people in our organization, primarily for software development and IT projects (of course :) ).

Our management is very pleased about the detailed reporting we are able to provide, based on the project data. Thus, they want the tool to be used for another business case, namely the project management of the non-it-departments.

There is one problem now. Those project teams are not used to log their time spent. They just work on stuff :) - and the question came up, how to produce the corresponding data. Yes, we could create users for all of them, but we do not want that. 

So, there is a certain demand and I hope you know a solution.
Let's say there are some issues with certain estimates and when closing the issue the project responsibles want to enter the time spent (for multiple people) as an aggregate. It shall not be necessary, *who* explicitly invested the time. It is rather the sum that is of interest (time estimate, spent, and maybe remaining). 

We know that those values are not exact and just a rough value, but we do not care. It is rather about the lesson learned (planned like 20d, solved in 30d)... The rest will come over time.

When the responsibles enter those values directly into the task (not as a worklog entry but in the given fields) they are shown in their tempo timesheet, which we do not want. We want those values to remain anonymous.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks in advance!

Tobias

[Dave Mathijs · Accepted solution]

Hi @Tobias Zirzow Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Since you are hosting your Jira on-prem, is your site connected with an external directory? Or are you using the Jira Internal Directory?

You could create a generic user account and log your original estimate and time spent with this account.

This way, it is not tied to a specific user but you can report on it.

[Tobias Zirzow]

Hey! Thank you. Yeah the generic user might do the trick. We are onprem with data center. 

We might create that user internally even though we generally use the azureAD, but noone will login to it. we will give certain rights to the project manager role and they will be possible to log for the generic user.

We'll try that.

Favourite suggestion :)

Thank you!

[Deniz Oğuz - Starware · Accepted solution]

Hi Tobias,

Worklogs are always associated with a user. So, you either need to create users for non-it-department or assign worklogs to a proxy user. 

This may not be an ideal solution, but I have another recommendation. In my old company, we used to create a separate issue for each lessons learned. We had a separate "Lesson Learned" issue type. You can add duration fields to this issue type, such as "Planned Time", "Actual Time". In other words, instead of using worklogs you can use custom fields for this task. For a lot of timesheet apps, (our WorklogPRO app can do this) you can also select which custom fields you want to show on the reports. In this way, you can track these times along with your issues and show them as a separate column on time tracking reports.

[Tobias Zirzow]

Hey there, thanks for the answer!

We will consider it. The idea of a different issue type sounds interesting. It won't be my first choice, though ;)

But the custom field might be the trick. I will talk to my collegues.

Thankyou!

[Mary from Planyway]

Hi @Tobias Zirzow 
It's Mary from Planyway for Jira:)

This is a common question we get from our teams who have both IT related and non-IT related team members. As the second do not log time and just have the estimation, I can suggest Planyway Excel/CSV report that gathers all relevant information you need: estimations, and  scheduled dates. You'll also be able to export the status detail, so you'll see issues done and those that are not finished yet. You can then filter data by team members, projects, etc.

Let me know if you need further assistance:)

Happy to help!

[Tobias Zirzow]

Hey there. Thank you for your suggestion. I'll pass for now :)

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