When leveraging estimates time and action time in Hive you can:
Produce a burndown of how a project is tracking against estimated time
Flag early signs that a project may be going over budget
Use historical data for planning and estimating purposes
Note: It's preferable that you're starting with your projects already created & entered in Hive, so check out one of our other Workflow guides if you haven't completed that step yet!
How to utilize estimated time vs actual time in timesheet reporting.
First up, you need to decide where your estimates and actual time will be entered into Hive. Check out our workflow on Tracking how your team spends time for a guide to setting up your time recording.
Let's look at 3 different scenarios to help you compare your estimates to actual time recorded.
Scenario 1 - I want to estimate time at the project level for my team members and record time actuals on a timesheet aligned with those projects.
Your set up in Hive will require:
Inputs:
Estimate in Resource Assignment in the resourcing app
Time Actuals recorded in timesheets at the project level
Reporting Settings:
Prefil set to allocated hours in resourcing
Reporting data source set to Timesheets
Output:
Estimated time comes from Resource Assignments
Actual time comes from Timesheets
Scenario 2 - I want to record actual time and provide my time estimates at the task level for my projects.
Your set up in Hive will require:
Inputs:
Estimate time in Time-Tracking on each action card
Time actuals recorded in Time-Tracking on each action card
Reporting Settings:
Prefil set to Time recorded from action cards
Reporting data source set to Time-Tracking
Output:
Estimated time comes from time recorded in Time-Tracking in action cards
Actual time comes from Time-Tracking in action cards
Scenario 3 - I want to record time actuals in both the timesheets and the action card time tracking app in Hive.
Your set up in Hive will require:
Inputs:
Actual time recorded in Action card Time-Tracking
Actual Time recorded in timesheet
Reporting Settings:
Prefil set to Time recorded from action cards
Reporting data source set to Timesheets
Output:
Estimated time comes from time recorded in Time-Tracking in action cards
Actual time comes from Timesheets
Reporting Consideration - You will not see estimated time from Time-Tracking in reporting as Hive will prioritise the actual time entry when the reporting source is Timesheets.
Note: Currently Hive Time Management Reporting does not combine estimates from Time-Tracking on the action cards and time actuals recorded in Timesheets but this would be a great feature to develop. You are very welcome to jump over to our Canny Feature request and upvote this along with adding any other features you’d like to see on Hive.
Next up, you can configure your reporting using the different filters and tagging you have created to refine your reporting and visit the clipboard icon in Time management to open your report.
FAQ
If you have already submitted time - what happens if you change the settings?
When you adjust your time source and pre-fill settings any previous time submitted will remain as per your previous settings. The new settings will take effect for any subsequent time submitted.