Clarity

How are organizations "charging" back hours to an IT system?  Our organization organized resources into work team based on system they support.  As an example, System A would have 5 employees dedicated to maintaining and enhancing the system.  When a project comes along that requires work on System A (along with other systems), the system resources are assigned to a task within that project.  How are other companies tracking these effort hours to a their respective system?  Here's are options that I have contemplated and why they don't seem to work:

1. Create a system OBS to identify the resource "home" system.  When actual hours is submitted, I can then group all resource hours by this System OBS to see the "chargeback" by each system.  Problem here is that resources can be lent to work on other systems.  So even though I belong to System A, I may work on system B (potentially within the same project) and all my hours working on System B should be charge to that system.

2. Use resource financial attributes such as Resource Class or Transaction Class.  The issue here is that our systems are hierarchical.  For example System A and System B could be a child of System C.

Any suggestion or insight would be appreciated.

Have you considered using the Applications object? You set up your "systems" as applications. Each application can have a team of people assigned to it and those people can post time directly to the application (in the case of KTLO activities, for example) or you can associate applications to projects and let the team members post time to the projects. If you have resources who are working on two systems, you just allow them to post time to both systems as needed. In the case of your system hierarchy I don't see why you couldn't create a System OBS to organize the systems (similar to a department OBS for resources). That would allow you to report on your systems in a hierarchical manner.

Second Amy's suggestion.

Creating a 'system' under Applications, one can:

• plan costs
• book time directly to the 'system'
• create projects that support the 'system' and link them as children to the 'system's' hierarchy
• create ideas that might improve the 'system' and link these, as well
• integrate your helpdesk app with Incidents in CA PPM, and attach incidents related to your 'system'  - if help desk is booking time in the helpdesk app for supporting your 'system', then these hours can be brought in and rolled-up against your 'system'

Use the Application object - it is there exactly for your scenario and does so much more than OBS or resource attribute workarounds.  Don't workaround it - use it!

Thanks for the suggestion, Amy.  Trying to think through your suggestion - and I agree that it would work if there's a one-to-one relationship between a project and system.  In cases where we have project that requires development on multiple systems, therefore resources from different systems entering timesheet on that particular project, how would you be able to tell resource A actual hours should be charged to System A while resource B actual hours should be charged to System B?

Couple options: 

1.  Designate a percentage of child project to each parent - and call it 'good enough.'

2.  If you are using Financial Transactions, you might be able to tag such tasks with a Task Type or user value, that is captured in transactions - then use Create WIP Adjustment to filter for these transactions in order to transfer them to another project.  Hit the Transfer button - a new page should appear, where one can then select the investment that one wants the transactions transferred to.

If this works for anyone, let me know how you got it to work, as my page only displays the following:

There's supposed to be a "Transfer From" section and an ability to change the values in a number of fields, including Investment ID.  From User Guide:

This may be the way to go.  However, this will only work one page of transactions at a time - what this means is that once you've filtered for the transactions you want to transfer, you can only 'select' those one page at a time - there's no 'select all' capability.

What I don't know:

• does the 'transferred' transaction contain a record of where it came from, the values originally provided before being transferred? (i.e. is their an auditable trail)
• what do the project managers see in the UI, hierarchy tab, etc.? 
  • I'm guessing the transfers only affect the transactional data
  • Would want to see the costs off the child project or a reimbursement from the parent - something where both child and parent investment managers can see that their costs are getting processed correctly, using the UI pages they are using now, within their projects.

Sorry I can't answer everything - until we get the 'transfer' page displaying all content, I can't test further, and I haven't found answers to my questions in available documentation, yet.

In your original post you suggested that the resources are organized by system they support. So technically if you look at actual hours posted to a project and divide it up by team it should equate to hours for that system, right? However, if that's not always the case you could create different tasks in the project for each system and have people post time to the correct one. And you could add a custom lookup attribute to the Task Object which is tied to application name - then you could have a really solid connection between task and application.

            Dale - we are not using financial at this time but thanks for the suggestion.  As for allocating percentages, I would agree that normally would be good enough.  Unfortunately, there is a belief within my organization that we need to chase accuracy down to the last decimal even though in reality I know the more detail you ask people to track, the less accurate the result.  Who wants to divvy up your 8 hours work day into 15-20 different tasks?

         Amy - we tried doing as you'd suggested about creating separate task for each system work.  It worked fine for small project but when we have project that are large - the schedule became unmanageable.

         How we are currently solving for this is to create a subproject for each system/team and assigning resources to each of those subprojects.  If you are working on a subproject for System A, all your actual hours are charged to system A.  So even if you were loaned from another team, the fact that you log time to System A project, we know to charge those hours to System A.  Each of these subprojects has their own schedule and are managed by their own PM.  The downside of this method is that it is difficult to understand the overall project status as there can be up to 10 or more subprojects with their own schedule each with their own PM managing.  Additionally, very few reports and portlets will rolled up subprojects info.

You have my empathy and sympathy! 

My most productive and enjoyable career experiences involved implementing theories advocated by Goldratt:  The Goal (constraint theory applied to manufacturing, costing), Critical Chain.(constraint theory applied to projects).  There are ideas now in Hanging Fire and The Phoenix Project that I would love to pursue.

15-20 tasks per day - sounds like a firefight...