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Looking for ways to track time spend on completing "workarounds"

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Level 5

We currently use the "hour types" as a way to track time to our different products. This helps us understand how much time the team is spending on each product inside our software. Sometimes, we are told by our product team to use a "workaround" to complete a task while they work on enhancing the feature or if they are fixing a functionality. We would like to track the time it takes to complete a task using the "workaround" to show our product team that the "temporary fix" is very time consuming and not sustainable.

We initially thought adding an hour type "workaround" would be helpful but as we thought it through, it would be hard for our management to see what should be "billable" to the customer as they customer should not have their service hours tracked against "workarounds" that our teams need to do.

  • For example: If it takes our team 3 hours to complete a task due to workaround, we don't want all 3 hours tracked against the customers bucket of service hours because it should have only taken 1 hour if the software was functioning as intended. We dont want our team members deciding how much should be "billable" vs "non-billable" as the billable decisions are up to our managers.

For the time being, I added a custom form onto the tasks that the team members can check off if they completed a workaround for the task but this isn't really giving us an idea of how much time they spend because of the workaround. We also though of using the "planned hours" as a way to see how much time the task "should take" to complete, but some of our tasks are recurring so this would not work as a proper way to compare planned time to actual time.

Does anyone have ideas or ways that they are tracking how much time they spend on "workaround" tasks.

Thanks so much, appreciate any insights or ideas.

2 Replies

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Level 10

Hi Erica,

I've been mulling this one over a bit. Although it sounds like Workarounds might be happening more often than anyone would like (or realizes; I suppose that's the point of this exercise), I'd suggest you model them as Issues on the Tasks which, in my mind, better matches what they are. By doing so, you can then easily count how many Workarounds happen on a particular Task, assign different resources, priority, and Planned to each Workaround, and even track time "under" each Workaround...all without muddying the waters of the real task to which each pertains.

What do you think?

Regards,

Doug

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Level 10

Lot's of people in my company regularly call it "WorkAroundFront" instead of Workfront!