How do you report on total 'Actual Effort' or 'Time Worked' for a project?

[kellykaufmann]

Part 1:

We are setting up 'Time Worked' and 'Time Cards' right now. For a Project, we want to be able to capture & report on Time Worked against the Project as well as the Project's: tasks, requirements, issues, defects, decisions, risks, and Story Tasks. Our plan is to have 'Time Worked' for each of these populate the 'Actual Effort' field for each, so nobody will actually type into the 'Actual Effort' field. Currently, Actual Effort on Project Tasks rolls into the Project's Actual Effort value. We want Time Worked / Actual Effort for each of these to also roll up to the Project's Actual Effort value, so you can see a rollup of all time reported against project things.

Has anyone done this? What was your approach?

It seems it's tricky to get the Actual Effort from all these different tables to roll up into one field (the Project's total Actual Effort). Any suggestions on doing this? Or do I just need to remove 'Actual Effort' from the Project form so people don't think it's a rollup of all the project's hours, and have them instead rely on creating a report on that project?

Part 2:

Speaking of reporting...how do you report time on a specific project for all that project's different time areas captured (requirements, issues, defects, decisions, risks, etc)? If I run the report against the Time Worked table, I can't use Top Task to pull in all those areas with the same Top Task (which is the Project number). If I use the Project table, it will just pull time reported directly against the parent project (and not against requirements, issues, defects, decisions, risks, etc).

[kellykaufmann]

Thanks Anna. You basically confirmed the wall I'm hitting.

We don't want to have to create tasks under requirements, decisions etc. just so we can roll up their time.

"For reporting, you could go write a report against the Requirements, Decision, etc tables and pull the Actual effort for the record whose Parent field matches the Project ID." > Yeah I just need to also pull in the time from the project tasks as well to get a total picture of all time reported against the project.

"but I believe we are looking at customizing the Project Effort Update business rule to include effort from other tables (other than Project Task, e.g. Decision, Requirement, etc.) to contribute to the overall project effort." > This would be WONDERFUL. Assuming this is too late to hit Geneva??

[anna_scheib]

Yes, we are basically looking at creating several reports against all tables that hold project effort. It seems that it would be a fairly easy "fix" to pull effort from all project children and I will submit this as a feature request. Thanks for bringing up the use case.

[kellykaufmann]

Thanks, Anna! Keep us updated on potential time frame of this.

And if anyone else figures out a creative solution for reporting against all project time, please let me know!

[kellykaufmann]

Anthony Okumura or anyone else have any ideas?

[arun_vydianatha]

Kelly

The rollup of effort from issue/risk/requirement is going to be tricky

Risk and issue tables are not planned_task extensions - so they don't have work_effort field OOB.

By defect do you mean SDLC defect table?

For Story Task I assume you are talking in context of Agile Projects. Story Tasks have parent set to Story - so work_effort from story task can be rolled up to Story. Story's parent is Sprint so effort can be rolled up to Sprint from Story. From Sprint to Project again rollup is tricky - because our principle is that one Project Team works on different Projects in same Sprint so we cannot set Sprint's parent to be a single Project.

We have two BRs with same name "Update Parent's Effort" - on pm_project and pm_project_task table. You can deactivate one BR and other BR change table from pm_project to planned_task then technically rollup will automatically happen to the Parent record from everywhere.

But rollup would break in places where I mentioned above.

But I would like to understand the use-case more - do people work on Requirement, Risk on a Project? I can understand people working on Defect. Won't requirements or risks be transformed to Project Tasks which people work on?

For instance this requirement needs the following 3 things to be done - Analysis, Coding, Testing for it be complete. So these are your three tasks for the requirement.

Thanks,

Arun