Capturing full time dwylers' time allocation in the short term

[iteles]

As someone in charge of allocation of resources, I would like to understand the contribution to overheads on our internal projects (as well as client projects) so that I can make informed decisions about projects (both internal and external) in future.

Related to #321 .

At the moment, most of our internal project work is being carried out by full time dwylers and without freelance invoices, there is less visibility of time allocated to each project.
Until we have time ready, we need a short term way to have visibility of this at the very least every two weeks.

Deadline: End of June 2017.

@markwilliamfirth What's the best way to MVP this?

[SimonLab]

At the moment I enter the time I spent on a google sheet. I've started well and describe (too much?) my activity with time. Unfortunately I forgot a few time to add the inforamation. I need a reminder or someone to tell me to enter the data.

[Cleop]

Me too, I use a google sheet. At the moment I manually add the dates as time progresses, I think it would be better automated (I think google sheets has a format for this). Also I currently only fill in the time with a project name ie. tachyons-bootstrap, no more detail than that. This originated from my automated invoicing model and is useful for statistical analysis because it means you can count and divide the squares by project name and get statistics for how many days in total per sprint has been spent per project.

[ghost]

The easiest way to do this is to timebox people's work allocation.

e.g. Simon
25% hours on QA
50% hours on dwylbot
25% hours on dwyl-site

e.g. Mark
20% dwylbot
20% dwyl-site
60% operations

e.g. Cleo
50% tachyons-bootstrap
25% dwyl-site
25% dwylbot

e.g. Naaz
100% OA

(these are just examples - not realistic percentage suggestions)

This removes the need for tracking and allows people to devote more time to getting work done. Resourcing can then be adjusted according to requirements.

Timeboxing is more difficult for people that are spread across a number of projects that require attention at unexpected times (such as yourself) - for this I would recommend using a time-tracking application like the one you currently use (or another one such as Toggl) or the spreadsheet system that Simon or Cleo has adopted. Either are good solutions.

[Cleop]

@markwilliamfirth, I think (certainly at the moment) I fall into a similar category to @iteles when it comes to jumping between projects. My time allocation is quite fluid according to day to day needs and changes for dwyl. Happy to follow direction for whatever system/ working works best though 👍 just wanted to make you aware of my current working patterns.

[ghost]

@Cleop @SimonLab can you share the links to your spreadsheets here please? Would be good to see how you both approach this already.

[Cleop]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UT5y8l1dU_BYl2HLoEsKvmBXXGMq4jomH2CcLk8_8lo/edit?usp=sharing

[iteles]

A note on current allocation of people to 'all the things':

• A list of tasks that need to be carried out forms in my head and in Github issues (either by my hand or by dwylers I ask to do this) - at the moment we have a lot of different and very fluid projects so this is usually a week of tasks, but might only be a couple of days at a time
• Those tasks are estimated
• An understanding is formed of roughly how those estimations work out in the week i.e. which pieces of work will be carried out on which days
  • This is maybe the only time the percentages of time spent on each activity could be calculated (we need to estimate and then see what that works out to)
• Project needs change every couple of days or so
  • It is often the case that aside from the established dev/QA/scrum master tasks, a dwyler is asked to jump onto another project to support the team, document or test documentation, share knowledge or do any number of tasks

Whichever way we decide to do this, there will always be a need for tracking of time against tasks to check how much time we actually spent on it.

@markwilliamfirth The key for me here is what format of time tracking is easiest for you to extract accurate and frequent management accounts from?

[ghost]

@Cleop so what you're actually doing here is a mixture of dynamic time-boxing and time-tracking. With true time-tracking the user starts and ends the timer at the exact start and end points of a task. What you've done is decided to split your week into hours and timebox work on an hourly basis in a dynamic way. It appears that your timeboxing is as a reaction to the work assigned to you, as opposed to being set out and planned in advance. Can you clarify whether you retrospectively estimate how many hours you spend on tasks or whether you plan in advance i.e. today I will do x hours of y and z hours of w?

Let's see how the @SimonLab spreadsheet differs

[ghost]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fnQYQj4GCd3JCDZI-aW0omPeC6QXRDGMJTFY3sCZmLc/edit?ts=594a8eb9#gid=0

[ghost]

Simon has approached this differently - he's taken more of a time-tracking approach, but with inconsistent rounding (sometimes to the nearest minute, sometimes to the nearest 5/10/15 etc). Simon also works outside of set working hours (flexitime) and tracks time related to tasks as opposed to projects.

@iteles would you be able to share the time-tracking app you use? Are you able to export the data? How does that work?

[ghost]

@naazy I understand your time is 100% on OA - is that right? Do you currently do any time-tracking at all with regards to tasks?

[naazy]

Correct @markwilliamfirth. I don't really time track with small tasks. With the bigger tasks (things that I've estimated will take at least 1 or 2 days), I usually just set a target day (in my head/a stickie) for finishing it and try to update the issue with the correct time estimate if I under/over-estimated. My time tracking is mostly in my head. Sorry - not overly useful!

At my old consultancy job where I worked on a range of different client projects, I had a stickie that I'd update at the end of the day with how I'd split my time. And then every Friday I had to submit my time estimates using the company's time tracking software.

[iteles]

That works for tracking time for now @markwilliamfirth , but again, as per #363 (comment) the key thing in this issue is to find a way to do it so that it can easily be fed into our accounts. Whilst having one place where everyone can update their time is a step in the right direction, it's still just as manual to get it into our accounts.

[ghost]

@iteles can you clarify what you mean by "fed into our accounts"? Do you want the actual time somehow recorded within Xero? Or do you mean a separate accounting spreadsheet that takes the total time? Do you have some acceptance criteria for this?

[iteles]

I would like to understand the contribution to overheads on our internal projects (as well as client projects) so that I can make informed decisions about projects (both internal and external) in future.

I've just been trying to use different wording to convey this ☝️

The task was to find the most effective way of capturing the time spent (and therefore the cost of said time) in a format that we could use in the most efficient way possible to understand how much we're spending on all projects for full time dwylers, for whom we don't have clear invoices in Xero from (we already know what needs to be done for freelancers more or less, see point 1 here: #383 (comment)).
Aside: Then as with all our tasks, to form it into a repeatable process that can be documented and carried out easily by future dwylers.

The acceptance criteria is simply the desired outcome ("visibility of time spent on each project by full time dwylers in such a way that we know what the contribution to overheads is for each project" - referencing #373 as per #363 (comment)) because this is a task that requires thought and consideration of options to reach said outcome, no more detail is really available until there is something to evaluate.

The way I would personally go about this is to allocate 2 hours to thinking about and writing out the various options and their pros & cons (is there a way of getting it into Xero? If we do it as a spreadsheet, are we going to spend a bunch of time copying data around? etc etc).

The effect of your comment above, is to push that thinking back onto my to-do list when in actual fact, that's exactly what I'm trying to delegate with the creation of this issue, so that it gets done faster than I could (so I can dedicate my 'thinking time' to other subjects)! 😊

Overall, this issue has now probably taken up more than 2 hours of my time anyway, just in trying to explain what is required. So it would be good @markwilliamfirth if you could please add a comment rewriting the user story and explanation for this issue in your own words so that I can learn how I can best communicate this kind of thing from here on out to avoid friction and wasting your time 👍

[ghost]

@iteles it's difficult to understand as there isn't clear acceptance criteria here

If this is the acceptance criteria:

• visibility of time spent on each project by full time dwylers in such a way that we know what the contribution to overheads is for each project

This time is already in the spreadsheet - if the above is true, as I understand all you want is these time blocks to be counted and multiplied by the day rate of the respective full-timer?

[iteles]

In essence, yes.

This issue was also about thinking how to do this most effectively but we can iterate from what you have.

[ghost]

@iteles as per #312 (comment) are you suggesting we should change the accuracy to 1 hour as opposed to a half day?

[iteles]

@markwilliamfirth It seems like our needs from the current solution (the spreadsheet you implemented) have changed as per the issue you reference.

This means there are two options to consider here as far as I can see:

• We find another way to do Invoice Approval Process #312
• We find a way to make this spreadsheet more granular because Invoice Approval Process #312 is dependent on it
• We find a better way to capture our time.

[rub1e]

Calculating a dwyler's daily cost

Obviously not putting up figures, but this is easily achieved by:

• Taking the employee's gross pay
• Adding 2% for pension contributions
• Adding on the EmployER NIC (just run pretty much any payroll report, e.g. gross to net)
• EDIT: Actually to get an employee's total monthly cost just go into any payroll report and Xero calculates total cost per employee automatically. (Multiply by 12 to get the yearly cost 😉 )
• Dividing by 228 (253 working days in a year, minus 25 days holiday)

Adding on cost of admin

Take the total rate of all employees responsible for admin, turn it into a daily rate as above

Then divide by the number of employees in non-admin roles and add to their daily costs.

[rub1e]

@iteles Anything more needed on this or can it be closed for now?

[iteles]

@rub1e We now have the costs, which is amazing (a lot more than we had this time last year and super useful).

What we don't yet have is a great way of determining how this is split across multiple projects and fits into #373.
Pulling this down in priority until that issue is done 👍