I’ve been tasked with developing a process to track the work we do in IT. They don’t expect 100% efficiency and they say they don’t want the process to be over-burdensome. They don’t want tracking our time to take up too much of our time. Would any of my fellow pointers care to share a system they use that works well?
A simple method I have done in the past is using a couple of lists. It’s really basic and dependent on others completing the work (nothing automatic), but shouldn’t take too much time.
Create one list called Work Tasks (or whatever makes sense to you). This list will track the work that needs to be done within your group. Add whatever metadata you want to track along with the tasks in the Content Type and add it to that list.
Create another list called Time Tracking (again or whatever you want). For it create another Content Type that you will use for this list. Within that content type add site columns for the following:
- Hours Spent
- Date Occurred
- Related Task – This is the key field. This site column will be a lookup to the Work Tasks field that contains the name of the Task (Title?? or whatever you select).
- Add any other fields you want.
This solution now allows you quickly add a time entry based on a task that your team is working on. However, there are some cons to this. Your Related Task field can quickly become very large as you add more and more tasks. A way around this is to add a calculated field to the Work Tasks list and another field called Status. Set the formula of the Calculated field to “=IF(Status=”Active”,Title,””). Point Related Task to this. This means that only active tasks will be displayed in the drop down. There is however one major limitation to this. When you deactivate a task, it will update your Time Tracking list as well to blank so you won’t know what was there previously.
But don’t worry I have a fix for this too. Create one more field in your Time Tracking list and call it Related Task Archive (or again, whatever makes sense 😉 ) Create a simple WF that when an item is added to Time Tracking it copies the value from Related Task to Related Task Archive. This way, you can keep your drop down list limited, but not affect the data you need. You can then create a view that shows the archive field as opposed to the selectable field.
I broke up my explanation like I did as you indicated you weren’t supposed to spend a lot of time on it. By breaking it up, you can decide how much you want to do and what limitations you are going to have if you stop at a certain point. Also, this isn’t a perfect solution. There are likely many ways of doing it better, but it should meet your needs and your requirement of not being over-burdensome.
Please let me know if you have any questions. I hope this helps you out.
Dave
