What's the best way to track time worked manually on tasks?

[PierreDumoulin]

Hey my friends,

I have an ask from our facilities management department to track time worked on a task. This is currently compiled manually in excel. Having a field contain the information on each task sounds like a good way to do it, however, strangely, there doesn't seem to be a lot of out of the box options that fit the bill. I've looked at the duration fields which more or less basically automatically compile time elapsed according to a business hours schedule. Delivery time doesn't seem like a good fit either. And then there's actually a field called time worked, However, this is a live timer that needs to be started and stopped.

In my context, these are folks performing maintenance and they don't necessarily have portable equipment to report their work on in real time. I'm wondering if anyone has a similar scenario and what solution you implemented. I'm really hoping to not have to introduce a custom field...

thanks for your attention! looking forward to reading you and discussing this!

[Julie Gordon]

I had a similar ask last year & our techs don't have portable equipment either.  Our Facilities wanted to know 4 Metrics:

1. Time to Assign = Time from open to Assigned

2. Time to First Contact = Time from Assigned to first customer visible comments

3. Case work time = Time in the Work In Progress state

4. Total Case time = Time from open to Closed. 

After a lot of searching & combining scripts, I ended up creating Metric Definitions based around the states of the case/task.  

Example: This one is based off the Work In Progress state:

createMetric();

function createMetric(){

    var s = current.state;

    var mi = new MetricInstance(definition, current);

if (mi.metricExists()){

      if (s != 2) {

          mi.endDuration();

      }

    } else if (s == 2) {

        mi.startDuration();

    }

    }

I then displayed a related list on the Case for these metrics.  Basically, if the state is not used, then the Metric is not generated.

Then you can report on the metrics too.  Hope this helps. 

[PierreDumoulin]

Hi Julie! thanks for contributing to this, I really appreciate it. So, bottom line, what I'm hearing is, by design, ServiceNow really means to imply these values from real time status updates. The issue I have is, I think these people might just update their tickets once a day. If the only out of the box option is to get them to do it in real time, I might as well advertise the time worked timer. It seems a bit intensive to have these fulfilllers punch in everytime they start work on something, and then punch out to make sure the clock doesn't keep running in the event where the task isn't immediately completed.

[Julie Gordon]

Yep, or even a blank Time Worked field that the tech manually enters their time, but that would probably be a guesstimate at best.