Reducing the effort of tracking time at an Exciting Government Agency

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Suzie has shared her work stories Implementing Single Sign-On for Exciting Government Agency and Managing users in an Exciting Government Agency with the Atlassian Community recently.

Like many of people reading this article, Suzie is a Jira Administrator. As an Atlassian Certified Professional, she is trusted to find and implement solutions tailoring the Atlassian experience to suit the business requirements and meet the regulatory needs of her employer.  Suzie works as an Atlassian Product Support Specialist for a highly regulated government department we know as Exciting Government Agency (EGA).

The following is based on actual use cases. Only the names, locations and events have been changed. No Jira Admins were harmed in the writing of this article 

Suzie is tired. It is Friday and the hands on the clock will soon be pointing to the numbers that indicate it is time to start her commute home. There is one last thing to do before shutting down her computer for the week - make sure she has logged time against the tickets she has worked on this today.

Suzie navigates to her browser history to see what Jira issues she has worked on in the last few hours. After lunch she managed to work on a project task, helping Wilson with some information on an issue from the day before, assisted the new guy who needed help finding his way to the Atlassian University tutorials and finally, she filled in on the help desk for a couple of hours. Using the browser timestamps, her memory, and a dash of creativity - Suzie enters enough work logs to match the number of hours she had worked then logs off for the week.

She is glad she doesn't need to forensically recreate her whole week like some people in her team. The accuracy of their work logs is dubious at best!

... Friday, Saturday, Sunday ...

It is Monday and Suzie is back at her desk. While looking through the emails she received last week she sees "Meet us at Atlassian Summit 2020" from TechTime, an Atlassian Marketplace vendor she recently purchases apps from.  

This year we’re introducing EasyTime - automatic time logging for Jira. 

This sounds like an app worth investigating. Who wouldn't want work logs recorded automatically?!

Suzie decides to pilot EasyTime with one of the quieter help desks. The Getting Started with EasyTime guide shows her how easy it is to restrict this new tool by user group and JQL so the pilot can be limited to specific people and projects. The flexibility of JQL means EGA could prevent work logs being automatically created on tickets that represent hardware in their Asset Register.

The team piloting EasyTime find the app easy to use. With no change to what they were doing the previous month, Jira issues are being populated with accurate work logs. The different work log comments are pre-populated depending on whether they were viewing the issue, commented on the issue, or resolved the issue making it easy to review work logs and add more detail to the work log comments when required. 

After a quick check that EasyTime is also available for Data Center (it is) and with the knowledge that TechTime is a reliable vendor (we are ) - Suzie submits her recommendation to Wilson, the IT department team leader, and Geoff in Procurement for consideration. 

Whether you want your work logs to appear without effort, you are over chasing your team to complete their timesheet, or you need accurate time logs for billing customers - be like Suzie and trial EasyTime for Jira Server or Data Center today.