Reporting
Time tracking can help organizations, teams and individuals to better understand what they spent their time on. The time entries are a great source of information for resource planning and improvement initiatives.
You will want to create some dashboards and make them available to your organization to get the most value out of Xurrent’s Time Tracking functionality. Another reason to share dashboards with time tracking information is to support organizational change management (see also the next chapter). To have time tracking accepted by the organization it is important to create transparency.
Time tracking has been setup now for the Widget Europe, Information Technology organization, but only a few time entries have been registered. That is why you will perform this exercise in the Widget Data Center account where more time entries can be found.
Exercise:
Log in to the Widget Data Center account as Howard Tanner. Howard Tanner has also the Administrator role in the Widget Data Center account. Every specialist can build private dashboards in Xurrent (a private dashboard is only visible to the specialist that created it), but you need the account administrator role to create shared dashboards (visible to all the specialists in the account).
Go to the Analytics console. From the previous exercises you know that you can find the ‘Timesheets’ section there. It gives Howard access to the monthly timesheets of Widget Data Center’s specialists.
Question:
When you open the ‘Timesheets’ section, you will notice that Howard Tanner is able to select the timesheets for 2 organizations: Widget Data Center, External IT and Widget Data Center, Internal IT. Howard Tanner has the Directory Administrator role of the Widget account and the Account Administrator role of the Widget Data Center support domain account. Can you explain why he is able to select these 2 organizations in the ‘Timesheets’ section?
As an administrator of a support domain account, Howard Tanner has access to the timesheets of all people who belong to this account’s organization and its child organizations, plus all people of the organizations that are registered in the support domain account. The organization linked to the support domain account is Widget Data Center. Widget Data Center, External IT and Widget Data Center, Internal IT are both child organizations of Widget Data Center.
If Howard Tanner logs in to the Widget directory account, he will see the timesheets of all organizations that are registered in the directory account (e.g. Widget North America, Information technology). That is because, as a directory administrator, he has access to the timesheets of all people of the organizations that are registered in the directory account.
Imagine that Widget Data Center needs a dashboard ‘Billable Time’. It should include an overview of the billable time spent and the associated cost for the Widget Data Center organization on a monthly basis for the last 13 months, and the billable time spent and associated cost for each specialist over the same 13-month period.
Time spent reports are disabled by default in Xurrent, because this data can be considered sensitive. The organization should carefully consider the pros and cons of sharing this information with its specialists before they enable these reports. In the Widget Data Center account in the demo environment all time spent reports are enabled so you are able to build a dashboard without enabling any reports. Remember that in a QA or Production environment you will need to enable these reports first. This can be done by an administrator who will find the disabled reports in the Analytics console in the 'Reports' section in the view 'Disabled Reports'. On each report a checkbox is available to enable or disable the report.
Some work that’s performed by the specialists of Widget Data Center is charged back or ‘billed’ to their customers. To identify this work, effort classes with the key word ‘Billable’ have been defined and related to the timesheet setting of the Widget Data Center organization. In this exercise you will see how a dashboard can be created to report on time entries that have a ‘billable’ effort class related to it.
- In the Widget Data Center account, go to the Analytics console
- Open the ‘Dashboards’ section.
- Click on the toolbar button with the ‘plus’ sign to open a new dashboard.
- Give it the name ‘Billable Time’
- Select the ‘Shared’ category (instead of ‘Private’).
- Click on ‘Add Reports’
- Select the ‘Time Spent’ report and click on ‘done’ in the top right corner of the report selection form. This report displays all the time spent, including the non-billable time.
- Because we are only interested in billable time, we need to add a filter. By adding this filter at the dashboard level, it will be applied to all reports on this dashboard. Click on the ‘Add Filter…’ link at the top of the dashboard and select the filter ‘Effort class’. In the overview with the available effort classes select all the billable effort classes and click on ‘Done’ in the top right corner to apply this filter.
- Now you still need to change the title of the report. In the top right corner of the report, click on the pencil icon to edit the report. Modify its name to “Billable Time Spent”.
- In the same way, add another report: ‘Cost of Time Spent’.
- Once you are done, save your dashboard.
- You can still modify the layout of this dashboard. Press the Edit button in the toolbar to place the dashboard in Edit mode and see how you can resize the reports. Resize the two reports on ‘Time (Cost) spent by Person’ and put them side by side. Save your work to see the result.
Your dashboard should now look similar to this:
