Tracking Non-project time

[Timothy F1]

We recently started using PPM to track projects. We are using the time sheet portal as well for both operational work and project work. We make use of tracking time against project tasks, make use of the time categories like (Keeping the lights on) KTLO, and some track time against operational tasks (incidents, changes, etc) which then role up into the KTLO category. 

Many of our teams have expressed the desire for buckets of time for operational work that may not have a specific type of task associated with it, but they still want to track how much time it's taking up. For example one team wants to keep track of how much time they are spending on maintaining a certain type of data element within their application, another wants to track how much time within the maintenance bucket they're spending on tracking security issues. 

We've come up with a few possible solutions, but they each have their drawbacks. 

• Create perpetual/yearly projects that people track time against. The problems provided by this approach include that project and operational time gets skewed by tracking operational time against project tasks. 

• Create an operational resource plan for each type of work. The issue with this is easily selecting these resource plans from the time sheet portal, which only displays the number of the resource plan, which is hard to keep track of if you have 3 or more to choose from. It looks like to use this option we would want to steer users away from the time sheet portal for that task entry so they would be able to tell what they were tracking their time against. If it would be simple to adjust the widgets to display the name or short description of an operational resource plan, that may be the way to go. 

• If possible, add more options to the "More" area of the task picker in the Time Sheet Portal that would vary depending on what resource plans the user was assigned to. 

Is there another better option that we haven'e considered? This could be a task type, or possible tweaks that we're not aware of. 

[Brenda Colwill]

Hi @Timothy Feig ,

We have the same use case. We implemented a combination of your first 2 bullet points, specific to how different teams work. We haven't come up with a better way either.

Brenda

[Patrick Laroch1]

Hi,

Have you looked into adding new time categories?

If the requirement is specifically to report on time then  time categories on the time cards would do the trick.

Thank you,

[Timothy F1]

Hi Patrick, 

Thank you for the suggestion. It's a newer feature, so many are not familiar with it. Yes, we're planning to use the project time categories for tracking different types of project work. The issue we run into is that these categories are the same for everyone and do not appear to be able to be filtered to only display for certain teams, which all would have slightly different needs for their particular buckets. 

Thanks,

Timothy

[Jonah Piascik]

We are working through this as well.  I think it comes down to how much you want to carve out on the planning side vs. just capturing the actuals on the time tracking side.  In terms of being able to identify the different resource plans in the time sheet portal, you can modify the 'display value' on the resource_plan value to use name/short_description instead of number - there is a response here by @Rae Ann Prasnicki that shows this in detail.

Subscribing to this thread as I'm eager to see how others are handling this.  I'm also looking at the 'My Calendar' events for planning on other scheduled events (i.e. PTO, Training, etc) that may not be already accounted for in an operational resource plan.