Tracking general activities against projects

Si Hobbs November 14, 2013

We are road-testing Tempo to replace our previous time tracking system completely. There seems to be a couple of gaps

  • How to track non-issue activity, such as ongoing sales discussions and project management effort.
  • How to track presales activities in a way that those times can be unified with the main project later for reporting purposes?

It seems to me that only solution to this is "meta issues" that are never closed. Is there a better solution? Did I miss a feature?

Update: I experimented with "Internal Activities". It looked promising at first, but it only allowed me to plan work, they don't seem to allow me to log time against that activity.

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Sverrir Tynes [Tempo]
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November 14, 2013

Hi Si

I suggest you use Internal issues in Tempo Timesheets for non-issue activity

Internal issues is intended for logging work against issues that are common to users like vacation and sickness hours.
Please also take a look at the Using Internal issues in Tempo example

Regarding presales activity you may want to evaluate if you can use Tempo Accounts.

The Account Manager gives a way to address different dimensions for done work, other than the JIRA issues themselves.

Hope this helps

Sverrir Tynes
Tempo support


Viðar Svansson [Tempo]
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November 17, 2013

I think the feature he is looking for is to log work on account/project directly.

Si Hobbs November 18, 2013

We are currently testing the Account Manager functionality, it's looking very positive so far. I will report back when we've made a decision.

Si Hobbs November 18, 2013

I should note. Having set up Account Manager, I still appear to be unable to log work on an account without an issue to assign the work to. (As Viðar pointed out.)

Viðar Svansson [Tempo]
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November 18, 2013

Yes. Unfortunately you need to create a house cleaning issue in the project to associate with the account. But it is on our roadmap to be able to log work without an issue. Stay tuned!

-Viðar

2 votes
Si Hobbs November 20, 2013

Our solution to this, in brief:

Once only:

  1. Activate the Tempo Account field.
  2. Create "Accounts" for our clients (we ignore the "Category" and "Customer" configuration)
  3. Assign the Projects to Accounts, so that each Project has one Account
  4. Create a new Project called something like Pre-Sales
  5. Assign this Project to *all* active Accounts
  6. Add the new "Tempo Account" field to the issue form

Each new Account:

  1. Create the new Account
  2. Assign the Presales Project to the new Account

We can then log work against the presales project. For issues on normal projects there is only one Account and this will be selected by default. For issues on the Pre-sales project, the person has to manually select the Account that the issue is associated with when creating the Issue.

We can then report in two ways:

  1. Report against the Account, this includes all Projects associated with that Account, including time on issues from the Pre-sales project.
  2. Or, we can optionally move an issue from the Presales Project into a normal Project, in order to produce a comprehensive report at the Project level. Move issues will carry all time across with it.

1 vote
Aaron Kopel January 21, 2014

Its a bit odd to me that none of the major agile PM tools offer project level time tracking. Given that most agilists i've met would agrue against tracking actual time spent (aka "effort") on stories/tasks due to the overhead, hassle, and uselessness of it in general, I guess everyone is relying on project/client-level time tracking to be handled by their accounting or payroll system.

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