Time reports every project manager needs

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How to manage efficiently? Based on data. Where do you get data from? Reports. As a project manager, you probably need to handle many different issues on a daily basis. This requires making decisions and the more informed you are, the higher the chances to make the right ones. That’s why today we’d like to present a few time reports which, in our opinion, can be especially valuable in your daily work. We divided them into three categories:

• Reports useful from a business perspective
• Reports helpful from a team-management perspective
• Universal reports
  
  

With Worklogs - Time Tracking and Time Reports ’ filtering and grouping options, you can create various combinations of reports that will give you insight into different data. 

Reports useful from a business perspective

There is the business side of your work as a PM that needs to be taken care of. Business likes data and statistics, that’s for sure. So, what kind of information can you gain from Worklogs reports that can help you in this case? Here are some suggestions for reports useful from a business perspective:

Categorize by: Customer
Group by: Project
Secondary grouping: Total budget

This setting uses custom fields and allows you to see how big clients’ projects are in terms of the money they spent on them. Also, you’ll be able to see how much time was devoted to each. Does your company spend more time on high-budget projects? Or maybe you will find out that there’s been a lot of time devoted to a project that actually isn’t going to bring you that much money, compared to others.   

To see a more general overview, you can skip Project as a secondary grouping and set:

Categorize by: Customer 
Group by: Total Budget

 

Worklogs will then show you how much money you're paid in total and how much time was devoted to each client in general (without distinguishing between projects). 

These two reports can also be great whenever you want to present a summary of your work to the board of your company. You can save them as tables, pie charts, or bar charts – the last two options can be an especially good choice when you’re creating a presentation.

Whenever you’re preparing for a meeting with a client, you can create a JQL filter so only Jira issues connected with this particular customer will be displayed. Then you can set Worklogs filters as follows:

Categorize by: Project
Group by: Issues
Secondary grouping: Original estimate  

As a result, you will be presented with data for the particular client (the one you chose in the JQL filter) and you will be able to compare the time estimated for the ticket with the time that actually has been spent on it. 

Reports helpful from a team-management perspective

What about day-to-day cooperation with your team? You probably would like to know some details about how they work, what they work on, and how long it takes them. Maybe you’re asking yourself some questions like ‘Is anyone struggling with something?’ or ‘Is the workload optimal for my team?’. These reports can be very helpful from a team-management perspective:

Categorize by: User
Group by: Issues

Choose the date range you are interested in and you can see what your team has been working on in that period and how much time it took them. It will give you insight into their general productivity as well as which tasks they needed more time for. If something took especially long, it might be a sign that there was some obstacle the assignee struggled with.  

*If you’d like to get more information on what the issue was, you can also add secondary grouping: issue type. This will help you sum up how many hours a person spent on a particular issue type. 

Whenever you want to gain insight into how your team works, we suggest generating the following reports:  

Categorize by: User
Group by: Status
Secondary grouping: Issues

This can show you the general workload of each team member; how many issues are still in progress and how many have been completed. This can help you decide whether the person has space for a new task, or perhaps is notably overloaded as there are many tasks that haven’t been completed yet. 

Categorize by: User
Group by: Issue Type

 

Now you can compare how much time it takes for each team member to tackle a certain issue type. Are the values similar? Or maybe certain issues take someone especially long (or short) compared to the rest of the team? 

Categorize by: User
Group by: Sprint 

 

With this combination, you can see how much time your team members devoted to certain sprints. Worklogs will also show you a summary of how much time each person spent on all sprints in total. 

You can also check the time devoted to tasks in a particular sprint, by selecting it in the Sprint field:

Universal reports

Last but not least, here are some reports that can be helpful in your daily work as a project manager. 

Categorize by: Project
Group by: Priority

 

Here you can see how much time was devoted to a certain project as well as how much time tasks with different priorities took. 

Categorize by: Project
Group by: Status
Secondary Grouping: Issues 

 

This setting will provide you with an overview of how your team is doing with all projects in general: what has been done, what is being done, and how much time has been spent on it. 

Categorize by: None (issues)
Group by: Story points 

 

This combination will let you compare the estimation in story points vs the time that has been spent on Jira issues. It might turn out there will be some issue there were no story points for and yet, a lot of time was spent on it. This might be a sign that this issue was actually something important and maybe it is worth assigning story points to it. 

Categorize by: Project
Group by: Epic

 

With this report, you will find out how much time was spent on each epic within a project, as well as a summary of the time spent on all epics within a particular project. Remember that epics sum up all child tasks. 

Summary

With Worklogs, you can gain insight into different combinations of data that will help you review workflow from different angles. You can use them to prepare for a client or board meeting. They can also be a great source of information that can then be presented to your stakeholders. Last but not least, they can assist you with team management-related tasks. Remember that certain Worklogs reports can be exported as pie or bar charts which makes them a great choice for situations when you want to illustrate data in a clear, visually-pleasing way.