3 ways you can improve your worklog reports with tags

Analyzing worklog reports usually provide managers with information on how their team performs and, analyzed further with other capacity manager tools, how the workload is distributed between teams, tasks, projects, etc. In a basic Jira report, however, usually, only the time data and Issues, Projects, or Jira fields are available.

But with apps and custom extra fields like tags they provide, the business value of these insights is greatly improved. Worklog tags help categorize and organize worklogs. Plus, you can add multiple tags to the worklog, so it supports multiple use cases in creating internal or business reports. Let’s see a few examples:

Measure work type distribution in a software development team

Monitoring efforts by their type can help you discover overheads in the team. For example, if the developers spend too much time on QA tasks, you should consider hiring a QA expert. If your team spends hours on meetings, then it’s time to revise your “meeting policy”.

There is one more benefit of using this framework: team members can describe the activity without entering a single word into the worklog description field.

  • Tags to use: Development, Testing, Code review, Support

  • Helpful if you are: PO/PM, Scrum Master

  • Business goal you can achieve: Measure how many hours are logged to each SW dev work type for a feature or bugfix, and find where the most or least time is spent to identify problems or areas for improvement. See how much time takes to perform a specific type of work across projects or teams.

  • Another benefit: Track time only with tags, without needing a work description.

Track overtime

Working on external projects with hard deadlines? Developers may work overtime to deliver the product. If all these extra efforts are marked, you’ll be able to invoice extra hourly rates or just compensate the team members based on the “overtime report”.

  • Tags to use: Overtime

  • Helpful if you are: Users, Developer, PM/PO, etc.

  • Business goal you can achieve: Users can mark the work performed above the expected number of hours and track how much overtime has been logged.

Mark time entries that are billable or non-billable

Based on the contract, not all efforts are invoiced to the customer. Having an internal meeting, doing some research, and ramp-up activities may be excluded from the invoiced hours. Tags are helpful in annotating differences between billable and non-billable efforts. Plus, you can combine it with activity-type tagging, e.g.: internal meeting (non-billable), or customer meeting (billable).

  • Tags to use: Billable, non-billable

  • Helpful if you are: PO/PM, CFO

  • Business goal you can achieve: Differentiate client vs. internal work.

 

Interested to learn more about worklog tag use cases? Well, the good news is, you only have to wait a bit! These three use cases were just the first part of an article series that will cover 10 use cases in total for using tags to enhance the reports and insight you can gain from worklogs.

Disclaimer: We are EverIT, a Silver Marketplace Partner from Hungary. Tags and billings features were recently added to our Jira Cloud app, Timetracker.

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