Complete Guide How to Manage Hogwarts Classes with ActivityTimeline

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As a new educational year is approaching, we decided to present you a use case of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Prof. Dumbledore gladly shared some of the secrets of successful Hogwarts administration & resource planning. Let’s start!

Expecto patro..

an expectation that the school of witchcraft and wizardry can be managed only by magic is a wrong one. Even the school of such level needs the right tools helping to administrate all of the school's faculties, create logistics plans for students' arrivals/departures, plan events, set up schedules and manage staff.

Don’t believe us? We’ll make you a small tour of the majestic school and show the inner workings of the Hogwarts Administration with the resource planning add-on for Jira - ActivityTimeline.

Put on your Invisibility Cloak and follow us, but be careful, pay attention to stairs, they’re moving.

Get a Comprehensive View of the School's Life

So, respectable deans and other professors mostly use a planning dashboard with timelines where they can see the ongoing activities and future plans within different timeframes. In summer dashboard is a little bit empty and mostly used by Prof. Dumbledore and Prof. Mcgonagall who create schedules and establish workflows.

They create different teams, based on studying years and faculty. After that, at the end of the summer, Hagrid develops the logistics plan for each team.

Oh, forgot to say that as for now the ActivityTimeline app in Hogwarts can be opened only with the words “I solemnly swear that I'm up to no bad planning!“, as one of the fourth-year students put a bug spell on the app, and the school Developers/QAs Aurors cannot fix that, so each and every time Prof. Snape must say that phrase, which makes all of the teachers and students laughing, especially Prof. Dumbledore)

So, I solemnly swear that I'm up to no bad planning!

The most interesting starts at the beginning of the academic year. ActivityTimeline provides both individual and team timelines, so professors can track not only group activities but each student’s plans and tasks separately:

Saved Dashboards help to pre-save frequently used configurations for the Plan View. It is a favorite feature of Prof. Mcgonagall, as management of the school with hundreds of students and teachers is not an easy task!:

Personal Workspace for Students and Professors

This section is very important, teachers and students can see their own tasks and schedule them with the help of the Work view:

They can also log their studying hours here. A house of Gryffindor is allowed to plan only with the internal bookings, and they mainly don’t log their hours and work with estimated tasks. But Prof. Snape is so strict that he requires all the students to log time by minutes, that’s why students frequently use a Timer which comes in handy and helps to calculate studying hours accurately:

This is a favorite module of Hermione as it helped her a lot when she traveled in time with the Time-Turner, her schedule was pretty confusing during that period)

Manage Non-Human Resources

This feature is highly demanded, as there are a lot of classrooms, equipment, and other magical stuff that must be properly distributed in order to avoid delays.

For example, after the situation, when Slytherin quidditch team took Malfoy into the team as a new player and booked a field for quidditch without a queue, it was decided to start booking hours on the field with the help of ActivityTimeline:

Reporting & Timesheeting

These sections are really helpful for the administration. Obviously that Timesheeting section is the favorite one of Prof. Snape, he has spent there almost 3 hours in a day, but with the advent of the saved dashboards he spends no longer than 1 hour, which makes him a little bit sad :

Reporting section helps to generate various reports, e.g., the Resource Utilization Report perfectly shows the workload of the teachers and students, whether they aren’t over-, or underloaded. Prof. McGonagall always says that “They’re just kids!“, so she uses this report quite frequently in order not to overload the students:

But she is powerless against the hyper-productivity of Hermione!

We’re moving closer to the end of our short tour, so let’s just say a special spell to close the app -“Mischief Managed!“

Hogwarts has been using the ActiityTimeline for many years despite Prof. Trelawney’s prediction that it won’t work for the school as students break it on the first day  But our experienced developer’s team is used to hard spells and security issues, no worries!

Did you know, that even Santa Claus uses ActivityTimeline for his time management during the high season! Here’s his use case, enjoy

Check out our Blog page and discover more useful tips for your advanced planning.

[Britta Neugebauer _yasoon_]

I love this! 🧙‍♀️🏰

[Halina Cudakiewicz_Deviniti_]

I love it!