Defining Time Allocations
The Widget Europe, Information Technology specialists need to report on 100% of their time. Specialists can use time allocations to report the time that they spent on activities other than assignments like requests and tasks. As a first step, it is important to identify all these other activities.
Question:
What are the time allocations you would expect to find in a typical service delivery organization?
Typical time allocations for service delivery organizations are
* Vacation
* Medical Leave
* Administration
* Meetings
* Training
* Travel
Note: Avoid over-engineering the list of time allocations. A list that is too long reduces efficiency and could even reduce accuracy because people are more likely to select an incorrect time allocation. Consider defining a time allocation called ‘Other’ that covers all the edge cases.
Question:
Does it make sense to provide a time allocation to capture time spent on support when assignment time tracking has been enabled?
If you can make sure that for every support activity a request is registered, there is no need for a time allocation named Support. But this may not always be possible. Sometimes specialists spend time on phone calls and emails with customers. In that case you can define a time allocation for support. A time allocation can be linked to a customer organization when it is created so that it is even possible to measure the time spent per customer on support activities that are not related to tickets.
A time allocation consists of the following attributes:
- Name: make sure the name is unambiguous and easy for your people to understand.
- Organizations: you need to link a time allocation to one or more organizations. Only the people who belong to these organizations will be able to select the time allocation when they create a new time entry.
- Group: in some organizations the list of time allocations can become quite long. It is possible to group allocations together, to help people to find a time allocation more easily. It can also be used in reporting. As an example, it makes a lot of sense to define a Group ‘Time off’ with all time allocations used for non-working time.
- Description: for some time allocations, it can be useful to add a short description when the time entry is registered. For example, when someone registers a time allocation for training, Widget management wants to know which training was attended. When a time allocation is defined you can set the Description field to ‘Hidden’, ‘Optional’ or ‘Required’.
- Service and Customer: when Widget Europe, IT decides to use time allocations to register some support-related activities for which a request, problem or task was not registered. and when Widget IT wants to be able to break down this time spent by customer and even by service, these fields can be used. The Service and Customer fields can be set to ‘Hidden’, ‘Any’ or ‘One of the Following’. With the latter you can narrow down the services or customers the person can select when they register a time entry.
- Default effort class: in the previous exercise you have seen that you were able to define a default effort class for all time allocations at the level of the timesheet settings. This default effort class definition for time allocations can be overwritten with a default effort class for each individual time allocation.
Question:
In a setup with a directory account and support domain accounts in which account do you think the time allocations should be registered?
Time allocations are defined in the support domain accounts. The reason for this is that some time allocations can be specific for a given support domain (and not relevant for specialists working in other support domains). You want the administrators of these support domain accounts to be able to add the time allocation they need. When an organization wants some standardization of common time allocations for all support domain accounts (e.g. Vacation, Medical Leave, etc.) then one can decide that one support domain account will register and manage the common time allocations. For example, in your demo instance, the common time allocations for the Widget International organization are defined and maintained in the Widget Data Center account. The other support domain accounts can add time allocations that are only relevant within their own support domain on top of these common time allocations.
Exercise:
The specialists of Widget Europe, IT need to attend a training called ‘Data protection – GDPR policy’ in order to provide services for their customer, Widget Europe, CE. . Can you define the time allocation for this?
- Log in as howard.tanner@widget.com to the Widget Europe, IT account.
- Go to the Settings console and open the ‘Time Allocations’ section.
- Create a time allocation named ‘Data protection – GDPR policy’.
- Define a new group ‘Training’.
- Set the option ‘One of the Following’ for the customer and select the ‘Widget Europe, SE’ organization. There is no need to fill in a description or a service.
- Set the Default effort class to ‘Normal Business Hours’.
- Link the time allocation to the organization Widget Europe, Information Technology.
