How to manage the non-issue time in a Jira Project ?

[Assia Touati]

Hi Atlassian Community,

I'm just begining in JIRA. I would like to know what is the best way to manage the time dedicated to the management tasks (meetings, holidays, sick days of a member,...) in order to adapt it to the current project.
Thank you for your answers

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

A lot of Jira users create issues as place-holders for time logs.  Some do them in overhead projects, others keep them in the team's project.  Some use single issues for everyone's time (I do not recommend that), some split them right the way down to individual entries.

So, for example, we have project called "holiday".  We used to book holidays in there by having an issue with a start and end date, then logging one day per day off on it, but that doesn't fit too well any more, and we've simplified - we each have a single holiday issue now, to log against.  You could put these in the team projects, but I would avoid that if possible, as it'll get muddled in with reporting work.

[Assia Touati]

thanks for your answer, so i can add the team vacation time as an issue to each project ? and add each time member as a subtask ? sorry but i'm just triying to figure this out, i'm at the point of testing the product, didn't start a real project management and time tracking yet 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, you could do that.  I left out sub-tasks as a potential confuser, but we do actually use them in the scheme I'm thinking of.

Although we have our issues outside the projects in a container for "not work" (and we need a bit of security as the visibility of some of our not-work stuff is sensitive, so we need a security scheme), the holidays and sickness records are actually sub-tasks.  We have Holiday-7 (2017), Holiday-894 (2018), Holiday-2324 (2019) and so-on.  Then every person who needs to log time is a sub-task beneath that.  We care about accumulated holiday per person, and per year, but less so the overall.

Sickness we keep as separate issues per event.  So I might get sick-2313 and log a day for a migraine, then sick-2444 when I get a cold a few weeks later and log 2 days to that.

The reason I keep mentioning a container project for them is that you need to think carefully if you really want them in your project.  We don't, but I suspect you might from what you have said.  In some ways, it can be useful and make things feel very consistent, even when you're Agile, you can see how the numbers might be clearer to some if you say "Dave committed to 5 days off in this sprint"

[Assia Touati]

Thanks for your time and explanations, my last questions is how can you link this tasks to each project, if a team member is working on two different projects, how can i manage this in order to link this member to the two projects by considering his "holidays...etc.", so that i'll have the remaining time calculated by including this . Jira allows me to do it automaticly ?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

We don't do that - people are often active in several different projects and our reporting covers that automatically.  We don't use this stuff for planning much, as the nature of the work for a lot of us means itis not that helpful.

It sounds like you do need a strong link into a project, so it may well make good sense to have the non-work items in the projects.  You might have a bit of a struggle if you have people in more than one project through - do you create "working on another project" issues for them?  (I'd lean towards knowing their standard allocations personally - if, for example, Dave is on 3 projects, all three projects simply plan on the basis of Dave doing 2 days a week in P1, 1 day in P2 and the last 2 in P3)

[Assia Touati]

Thanks a lot for your explanations ! it's more clear for me .!