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CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

System

SystemApr 02, 2013 04:45 PM

navzjoshi00

navzjoshi00Apr 03, 2013 08:59 AM

  • 1.  CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 02, 2013 02:24 PM
    Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!
    Some organizations do not use or populate the resource Hire Date and/or Termination Date fields. The reason given is Human Resources is responsible for tracking resource hire and termination dates and Human Resources does not want this information made available to employees through a PPM tool.

    The Hire Date and Termination Date fields provide a functional capability that is different than tracking when a person is hired and/or terminated. These two fields are used to place bounds on resource time related data. In other words, for each resource, the Hire Date field sets the earliest period for which time related data is generated and the Termination Date field sets the latest period for which time related data is generated. Time related data refers to things such as allocation and timesheets.

    Given the above, a better name for the resource Hire Date and Termination Date fields might be “Start Generating Time Related Data Date” and “Stop Generating Time Related Data Date” which would indicate that these fields determine the beginning and stopping points for individual resource time related data and would also reduce the likely hood of people, including Human Resources, thinking that these fields are tracking the Hire and Termination date of resources.

    A couple of specific examples will help to explain the above.

    Example 1
    A client keeps 12 months of timesheet time periods open: Jan1 to Dec 31. On June 12 an employee joins a department that uses Clarity and needs to start doing Clarity timesheets. If the Hire Date on this resource’s record is left blank then this employee will have access to timesheets belonging to time periods with dates ranging from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31. If the resource Hire Date is set to June 12 and the resource Termination Date is set to Oct. 30, then this resource will only have access to timesheets belonging to time periods with dates ranging from June 12 to Oct. 30.

    Example 2
    You are staffing a resource to a project for the next 10 months. The resource’s termination date is set to a date 6 months from now because this resource is going on maternity leave at that time. When you add the resource to the team page for the project, Clarity will staff the person up to the date specified in the resources termination date field. Without using the resource’s termination date field the resource would be staffed for the entire 10 months without any warning from Clarity.

    Help the people reading this forum
    Post comments explaining why your organization does or does not use the resource Hire Date and Termination Date fields.

    Besides allocation and timesheets list the other resource time related data that is impacted by the resource Hire Date and Termination Date fields.


  • 2.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

     
    Posted Apr 02, 2013 04:45 PM
    Thanks for the tip Kevin! :grin:


  • 3.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 02, 2013 05:05 PM
    Help the people reading this forum
    Post comments explaining why your organization does or does not use the resource Hire Date and Termination Date fields.

    People just don't bother and consequently are not that precises in project and resource management.
    Respectively the admins are not that accurate with license management and do not mind performance deterioration due to large foot print of obsolete resources.

    Martti K.


  • 4.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 02, 2013 06:13 PM
    I believe that besides technology; people, processes, and interactions need to be considered when dealing with technology. Organizations should have a resource onboarding process and a resource offboarding process and those processes should deal with the setting of both the hire date and termination date fields. While at some organizations the administrators are responsible for updating these fields, the resource manager should be also be responsible for updating these fields with the PMO overseeing this activity. The people at some organizations may not know that functionality is tied to the hire date and termination date fields.

    Resource managers and the PMO may be more inclined to ensure that the hire date and termination date are set appropriately as they are the ones who will experience the impact when these fields are not set appropriately.


  • 5.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Apr 03, 2013 05:30 AM
    Thanks for this Tips and its practical example Kevin !


  • 6.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 03, 2013 08:59 AM
    Thanks for this useful tip, Kevin !!!

    NJ


  • 7.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 08, 2013 03:18 PM
    We've renamed the fields to Timesheet Start and Timesheet Finish. Out of the Box (OTB) the fields have two purposes - hire/termination dates and timesheet start/finish dates. In our reality, the two sets of dates are not necessarily correlated:

    - not everyone in our company uses Clarity
    - a resource can transfer into an area that uses Clarity, or out to an area that doesn't use Clarity
    - some groups that use Clarity, don't use Clarity for time entry
    - students leave and return

    Therefore, the timesheet start/finish dates have no association to hire/termination dates.

    Our HR group uses PeopleSoft and has no need for hire/termination dates in Clarity - if they ever do need them, we will likely create our own versions of these fields linked with PeopleSoft, but independent of the timesheet function in Clarity.

    Dale


  • 8.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 08, 2013 03:18 PM
    We've renamed the fields to Timesheet Start and Timesheet Finish. Out of the Box (OTB) the fields have two purposes - hire/termination dates and timesheet start/finish dates. In our reality, the two sets of dates are not necessarily correlated:

    - not everyone in our company uses Clarity
    - a resource can transfer into an area that uses Clarity, or out to an area that doesn't use Clarity
    - some groups that use Clarity, don't use Clarity for time entry
    - students leave and return

    Therefore, the timesheet start/finish dates have no association to hire/termination dates.

    Our HR group uses PeopleSoft and has no need for hire/termination dates in Clarity - if they ever do need them, we will likely create our own versions of these fields linked with PeopleSoft, but independent of the timesheet function in Clarity.

    Dale


  • 9.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 12, 2013 12:52 PM
    We use both Date of Hire and Termination Date but struggle with the Leave of Absence folks. How should you handle the person who's only gone for a month or so. If you leave the termination date blank when they come back you have a series of open timesheets that you don't know whether or not they should have been posted time. We can use the calendar to take them out of capacity and allocation but that doesn't tie to timesheets. If they mistakenly open a timesheet while they were out and cancel they can show up on the Missing timesheet report.

    We have the same problem with our fixed bid where they are a fixed bid price and don't log time while they are off shore, but are hourly when they are onshore and this can change month over month.

    Any recommendations?


  • 10.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 13, 2013 12:45 AM
    Thank you for your post.

    One way to deal with short leaves of absence is to treat them as non-project work. Either a project can be setup to deal with out-of-office time or the Other Work object can be used to capture out-of-office work.

    For example, if your organization has a 40 hour work week, resources can be required to submit a 40 hour timesheet every week regardless of what they are working on. The out-of-office project or Other Work object can be setup so that time can be recorded for vacation, personal time off, sick leave, short leaves of absence, etc. Doing this allows people on short leaves of absence to submit all their timesheets before they take the leave and then return to submitting timesheets the way the normally do upon returning after their leave.

    People who don’t log time while they are off-shore can follow the same procedure. They would still submit a timesheet and record 40 hours per week but would record some of the time to the off-shore project or Other Work items. This way the time would not be recorded against active projects and would prevent the timesheets as showing as missing.

    Are you currently using a project or Other Work item to track out-of-office time?

    Let us know your thoughts on this.

    Kevin


  • 11.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 13, 2013 04:31 AM
    Thanks for sharing this useful bit, Kevin !!!

    NJ


  • 12.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 25, 2013 02:21 PM
    Thanks for sharing - like everyone's pointed out this is helpful info.

    lisacawley4201963 wrote:

    We use both Date of Hire and Termination Date but struggle with the Leave of Absence folks. How should you handle the person who's only gone for a month or so. If you leave the termination date blank when they come back you have a series of open timesheets that you don't know whether or not they should have been posted time. We can use the calendar to take them out of capacity and allocation but that doesn't tie to timesheets. If they mistakenly open a timesheet while they were out and cancel they can show up on the Missing timesheet report.

    We have the same problem with our fixed bid where they are a fixed bid price and don't log time while they are off shore, but are hourly when they are onshore and this can change month over month.

    Any recommendations?
    We have the same problem here whenever someone goes on any sort of leave, departs the company but later comes back (which happens occasionally with external contractors and summer students / co-ops) or if someone changes roles. Currently for timesheets within these 'gap periods,' we either sweep them under the rug and pretend they're not there, or as Kevin suggests ask staff to submit timesheets ahead of time to an 'overhead' project we've created. Neither is a great solution though. It's an administrative headache - especially for things like maternity leave where we're essentially asking someone to submit a year's worth of timesheets at once (which further requires up to open up a year's worth of time periods ahead of time.) If anyone misses a timesheet within that span we either have to wait for them to return to work and then hound them, get our Clarity admins to fill it out, or just leave them unsubmitted, which affects and clutters up our RMs' "missing timesheets" stats and tracking.

    It would be great if a future release had additional time fields that could be used to exclude timesheet created for certain resources, in addition to the current "start" and "stop" fields, is what I'm getting it :)


  • 13.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 26, 2013 10:50 AM
    We've renamed the Hire Date to Timesheet Start and Termination Date to Timesheet Finish.

    When a person comes back form leave or school, we reset the Timesheet Start (Hire Date) to the new date that we expect the user to start filling in timesheets. This way, the timesheet from periods where the user was away, don't appear anywhere.

    Basically, in Clarity, we don't care about actual Hire or Termination dates - all we care about is the periods which we expect the user to fill in timesheets. We leave the hire/termination data to our HR systems.

    Now, I have heard about some Clarity customers creating a Resource subobject for capturing these series of changes. One could use the Audit Trail to do this, but the Audit trail will capture and hold everything, even mistakes. A custom subobject would only hold the actual changes to Timesheet Start/Finish (Hire/Termination) dates, not the mistakes.


  • 14.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted May 22, 2013 12:31 PM

    Dale_Stockman wrote:

    We've renamed the Hire Date to Timesheet Start and Termination Date to Timesheet Finish.

    When a person comes back form leave or school, we reset the Timesheet Start (Hire Date) to the new date that we expect the user to start filling in timesheets. This way, the timesheet from periods where the user was away, don't appear anywhere.

    Basically, in Clarity, we don't care about actual Hire or Termination dates - all we care about is the periods which we expect the user to fill in timesheets. We leave the hire/termination data to our HR systems.

    Now, I have heard about some Clarity customers creating a Resource subobject for capturing these series of changes. One could use the Audit Trail to do this, but the Audit trail will capture and hold everything, even mistakes. A custom subobject would only hold the actual changes to Timesheet Start/Finish (Hire/Termination) dates, not the mistakes.
    We have relabeled the fields, and also reset a resource to a new start date if they return. The old timesheets are still there just not visible in the standard views.
    We have built a portlet to access the timesheet data so it is availble across projects and resources.
    As Dale mentioned, we have also built in a subobject to the Resources for tracking changes in resource information. This is important to us as people change Teams (OBS values), changes as they move from Contractor to Employee or Employee to Contractor, and this is also where we store rates over time (not using financials or rate matrix).


  • 15.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 26, 2013 02:26 PM
    We do this and it works well


  • 16.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 14, 2013 06:41 PM
    In addition to being used with Timesheets, these dates are also used when booking a resource to an investment.

    When booked to a project that started before the "Hire Date", the resource on the investment reflects zero availability, prior to the "Hire Date". The same is true of the "Termination Date", for a project with the investment date after the "Termination Date" we see the resource has zero availability.

    This will impact the Resource Supply / Demand picture when working with Resource Management. When the "Hire/Termination Dates" are not used, the Resource Capacity picture will reflect more investment work can be done than there is staff available to do the work.


  • 17.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted May 24, 2013 12:33 PM
    It is not only "what's in a name". It's better to separate the DOH/DOT dates from start/end Generating Time Related Data Date. For us is a DOT a trigger to inactivate the resource (and licences).

    To solve this "HR sensitive information issue" CA should add two new data fields to the resource properties page (start & end generating time related data date)


  • 18.  Re: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 24, 2015 09:14 AM

    Hi Kevin,

     

    Thank you for posting your explanation of DOH/DOT dates.  We have a situation that I'm sure others are struggling with as well and I would like to know your suggestion(s).  We use the DOH/DOT dates for our contractors so they don't have access to the system if their contracts are not renewed (most are on a 6 month renewal contract); however when the RM allocates the contractors to a project for a year and we run a Capacity vs Demand, the resource has no allocation after his/her term date which skews the real picture.  How do other companies handle this?



  • 19.  Re: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip - Hire Date, Termination Date – What they do!

    Posted Apr 24, 2015 01:58 PM

    There's an idea on this subject open:  different date on opening a resource for time entry

     

    The Idea is based on an ERQ, so its not new.  My own experience on this subject goes back to Niku 6 - so its definitely not a new problem.  I've added some comments there and voted it up.

     

    Please, do the same.  Maybe we can get a change made?

     

    Dale