RT-2.0.14
My management team would be a bit quicker to embrace RT if I could show
them a way to track billable vs. non-billable hours worked by ticket
owners. [not just against a particular ticket if you see the
distinction]
I see that it’s possible with the Time Worked field to enter this sort
of data into a ticket’s history - but I’m not clear on how to generate
reports on it. Specific questions:
-
I assume only a ticket owner can peg the time worked counter? If
multiple users work the same ticket, each would in turn have to 'steal’
or ‘take’ ownership of the ticket to report time worked on a particular
issue, correct?
-
Is there any way to track these time pegs by user, and not just by
total time accumulated per ticket? Unfortunately, we’re evaluated by
our weekly and monthly ‘billability’ - percentage of hours in a week we
spend supporting billable activities. So while knowing just how many
hours to charge a particular customer for support activities is a Good
Thing™, knowing the distribution of those billable hours amongst the
troops would be Much Nicer™.
-
I’ve looked to the ‘contrib’ pages. There’re Reports.html and
Weekly.html apparently developed by Jesse Himself? but there’s no README
with it. Where does this plug in?
BTW - if i haven’t said so yet, thanks to Jesse & Associates, and all of
you guys on users and developers for a software package I’m becoming
ever more impressed with…this stuff rocks.
Drew M. Mooney
Motorola Professional Services
Drew Mooney wrote:
RT-2.0.14
My management team would be a bit quicker to embrace RT if I could show
them a way to track billable vs. non-billable hours worked by ticket
owners. [not just against a particular ticket if you see the
distinction]
I see that it’s possible with the Time Worked field to enter this sort
of data into a ticket’s history - but I’m not clear on how to generate
reports on it. Specific questions:
- I assume only a ticket owner can peg the time worked counter? If
multiple users work the same ticket, each would in turn have to ‘steal’
or ‘take’ ownership of the ticket to report time worked on a particular
issue, correct?�
no. Anyone can change that counter.
- Is there any way to track these time pegs by user, and not just by
total time accumulated per ticket? Unfortunately, we’re evaluated by
our weekly and monthly ‘billability’ - percentage of hours in a week we
spend supporting billable activities. So while knowing just how many
hours to charge a particular customer for support activities is a Good
Thing™, knowing the distribution of those billable hours amongst the
troops would be Much Nicer™.
changing the ‘time worked’ field is a transaction being tracked in the
history by user. But it is not easy to use in the matter You want,
because ‘time worked’ is absolute. If You worked on it for 30 minutes,
and I for twenty five, I would have to change it to 55 to reflect the
time worked correctly, and some script would have to sort things out on
a per user basis.
- I’ve looked to the ‘contrib’ pages. There’re Reports.html and
Weekly.html apparently developed by Jesse Himself? but there’s no README
with it. Where does this plug in?
Just put them into /WebRT/html/. You probably have to tweak
some variables.
BTW - if i haven’t said so yet, thanks to Jesse & Associates, and all of
you guys on users and developers for a software package I’m becoming
ever more impressed with…this stuff rocks.
If You really want to show some thankfulness, try to arrange for some
money to hire Jesse in Your budget…
Regards,
Harald
Harald WagenerAn der Alster 4220099 Hamburg*http://www.fcb-wilkens.com
- I assume only a ticket owner can peg the time worked counter? If
multiple users work the same ticket, each would in turn have to ‘steal’
or ‘take’ ownership of the ticket to report time worked on a particular
issue, correct?�
no. Anyone can change that counter.
DMM. Now That’s cool. Just tried this - and it works fine…
- Is there any way to track these time pegs by user, and not just by
total time accumulated per ticket? >
changing the ‘time worked’ field is a transaction being tracked in the
history by user. But it is not easy to use in the matter You want,
because ‘time worked’ is absolute.
DMM - here’s the rub. Well, I’d say this is a big enough deal that I and at
least one colleague will be busy figuring out how to track these times in the
days to come. If we come up with anything potentially useful to the general RT
public we’ll most certainly post it to this list.
- I’ve looked to the ‘contrib’ pages. There’re Reports.html and
Weekly.html apparently developed by Jesse Himself? but there’s no README
with it. Where does this plug in?
Just put them into /WebRT/html/. You probably have to tweak
some variables.
DMM. Thanks. I thought that’s where they’d go, but it seemed too simple. Doh!
BTW - if i haven’t said so yet, thanks to Jesse & Associates, and all of
you guys on users and developers for a software package I’m becoming
ever more impressed with…this stuff rocks.
If You really want to show some thankfulness, try to arrange for some
money to hire Jesse in Your budget…
DMM - somehow or other, I would very much like to see Jesse & Associates on
our retainer…such matters are beyond my purview at this point, but with a
bit of poking and prodding? Who knows?
Regards,
Harald
Likewise,
Drew
Harald WagenerAn der Alster 4220099 Hamburg*http://www.fcb-wilkens.com
changing the ‘time worked’ field is a transaction being tracked in the
history by user. But it is not easy to use in the matter You want,
because ‘time worked’ is absolute. If You worked on it for 30 minutes,
and I for twenty five, I would have to change it to 55 to reflect the
time worked correctly, and some script would have to sort things out on
a per user basis.
We had actually been looking at making extensive use of the “Time Worked”
field as well. We did encounter this very problem.
One thought I had was that the interface could be changed to make updating
a bit easier. The user who wanted to increase the time worked by N could
type in “+ N” or “Add N”. Seems like a bit of a hack but might be useful.
Would this seem useful to others? Would it be worth doing a patch for it,
or would it work better as a custom site modification?
– bkuhn
Harald Wagener wrote:
changing the ‘time worked’ field is a transaction being tracked in the
history by user. But it is not easy to use in the matter You want,
because ‘time worked’ is absolute. If You worked on it for 30 minutes,
and I for twenty five, I would have to change it to 55 to reflect the
time worked correctly, and some script would have to sort things out on
a per user basis.
Bradley Kuhn added:
We had actually been looking at making extensive use of the “Time Worked”
field as well. We did encounter this very problem.
One thought I had was that the interface could be changed to make updating
a bit easier. The user who wanted to increase the time worked by N could
type in “+ N” or “Add N”. Seems like a bit of a hack but might be useful.
Would this seem useful to others? Would it be worth doing a patch for it,
or would it work better as a custom site modification?
– bkuhn
Then Drew Mooney mused as follows:
We’re still mulling over this one. I’m curious about the built-in ticket
linking / dependencies / merging features of RT as a solution to this. I
haven’t tried it yet, but is RT out-of-the-box-smart-enough to add up the time
worked fields of two merged tickets?
If so [or if this wouldn’t be terribly difficult to hack in] then I’m thinking
it might be best to create linked tickets either dependent on or dependents of
the master ticket [need to give the logic of this some thought] for every user
assigned to a particular task.
Each user then tracks his own time against a particular task; and can submit
individual ‘time-worked’ reports each week, and/or when the master ticket is
resolved or closed for any other reason.
At this time we would merge all of the linked sub-tickets into the master, and
[hopefully] end up with a compreshensive history of both activity and
time-worked pegs.
Thoughts?
Drew M. Mooney
Motorola Professional Services
…
Then Drew Mooney mused as follows:
We’re still mulling over this one. I’m curious about the
built-in ticket
linking / dependencies / merging features of RT as a solution
to this. I
haven’t tried it yet, but is RT out-of-the-box-smart-enough
to add up the time
worked fields of two merged tickets?
Sorry to say, it is not. Any entry into Time Worked stays with
the original ticket record and, when that ticket is merged into
another, the time does not get rolled up into the destination record.
ttfn,
kevin
Yeah. Minutes after I posted that I played with it a bit and found out the
truth. Shouldn’t be too difficult to hack it up into something useful though.
I wonder if the boys on the development side are cooking up anything like this
for the RT-3.x plugins…
Have a nice weekend,
Drew
…
Then Drew Mooney mused as follows:
We’re still mulling over this one. I’m curious about the
built-in ticket
linking / dependencies / merging features of RT as a solution
to this. I
haven’t tried it yet, but is RT out-of-the-box-smart-enough
to add up the time
worked fields of two merged tickets?
Sorry to say, it is not. Any entry into Time Worked stays with
the original ticket record and, when that ticket is merged into
another, the time does not get rolled up into the destination record.
ttfn,
kevin