Clarity Time Tracking

[Anon Anon]

We have started using Clarity to log time to Projects that relate to client facing projects & internal administrative and support tasks.  On our Admin and Support projects that have been created we have set the start and finish dates of the project for an entire year.  We assign over 1,000 associates to each of the tasks.  The problem we are having is that once someone logs time to lets say to a PTO task it changes the finish date of the task from 12/31/16 to the date the first user entered time against the task instead of keeping the date of the task at 12/31/16.  I have tried using "must start on" & "must finish on" dates to hold it in place but that doesn't work either.  It seems that it is using something with the ETC value (which is set at 0) to calculate the task and say - you look like you're finished so I'm changing your finish date.  We would rather not use ETC values if possible b/c we would have to assign an ETC to all 1000 resources to one make the date stay and that their actual assignment status stays open for that date range.  We are having this same issue with our client facing projects as well - we import a time tracking tasks template and those are the only tasks associates should log time to.

 

When the dates end up changing an associate can no longer hit the populate button on their timesheet and have their tasks pull in...they have to now always go to the Add Task function to add it back in for the week if they want to add more time.

 

Any thoughts/direction/things to try would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Tamela

[Legacy User]

Don't use projects to track these admin and support activities - they aren't projects, not as I understand their description.

 

Look at using Other Work and or Services.

 

1000 resources on a single task - managing dates which are affected by ETC's going to zero - expect the answer you'll get back from Support is "Working as designed."

 

What you are doing sounds more like an allocation - "We allocate 1000 resources to a Support topic for a year - allocation hours are zero, but the allocation segment length is one year long - don't know if resource will ever book time to topic, and if they do, don't know how much they will book.  We just need a bucket for them to put their time into."

 

I think you will find Other Work and/or Services a better fit, as they are allocation based, not assignment (ETC) based.

 

You can also group related Other Work and Services into hierarchies in order to keep things organized, as if you were using a WBS in a project.

 

For example:

 

• Parent Other Work=User Support
  • Child Other Work=PC Support
  • Child Other Work=User Application Assistance
  • Child Other Work=Network Support
  • .....

 

You might also consider using Incidents (link your ticket system to CA PPM Incidents) where the incidents can then be associated with an Other Work or Service topic, or even to the Application that the ticket is supporting.  Users book their hours in your ticket system, CA PPM rolls it up - could then do some high level planning without having to allocate a 1000 resources to each topic - plan using a few roles, import the detail actuals from your ticket system.

 

My understanding of your problem may be wrong, but if I'm correct, appears that using tasks on projects might be the most difficult solution that could have been picked.

[Anon Anon]

Dale,

 

Thank you very much for this information it was very helpful and I will do some research on this option.

 

What do you suggest for an actual Client Project?  Right now we may have 200 tasks that are not time tracking related however we want to track time to the phases of the project so we have added about 9 extra tasks to each project that have time tracking checked.  There are typically only a handful of people logging time to these tasks on a project but still have the same issue with the date changing.

 

Thanks,

Tamela