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New Reports for Actual vs Planned Effort

Patrick Bakker
Pie Chart

To accurately determine the amount of time spent on changes and compare that to the time that was planned to be spent on them, it is important to also include time spent on related requests and problems.  For this, the ‘Changes by Effort Indication’ reports have been revised to better compare actual with planned effort.

The ‘Completed Changes by Effort Indication’ report is now called ‘Actual versus Planned for Completed Changes and Related Requests and Problems’.  The ‘Open Changes by Effort Indication’ report is now called ‘Actual versus Planned for Open Changes and Related Requests and Problems’.  Both reports show the actual versus planned percentage as a pie, donut or bar chart in up to 5 ranges:

  • <= 50 %
  • > 50 % and <= 90 %
  • > 90 % and <= 100 %
  • > 100 % and <= 110 %
  • > 110 %

The percentage is calculated as the time spent on all change tasks and all related requests and problems, divided by the planned effort of all change tasks and all related requests and problems of the changes that are included in the report.

When a user clicks on any of the segments of the graph, the ‘Changes for Effort Tracking’ view is presented:

Changes to change view planned vs actual
  1. This view is filtered according to the section of the graph that is clicked, using the ‘Actual versus planned effort %’ filter.
  2. The following columns have been added:
    a. Actual
    b. Planned
    c. Actual versus Planned (%)
  3. The actual effort as a percentage of the planned effort is now shown within the change, next to the actual effort.  The remaining effort is deprecated and will remain available for a limited time in export files and API calls only, with a value of 0.
  4. Time entries for changes now include those of related requests and problems.

A Planned effort field is now also available in requests, request templates and problems. The value in those fields can only be edited by the manager of the workflow to which the request or problem is linked, plus service desk managers (for requests and request templates) and problem managers (for problems). If the field is not populated, it stays hidden from users.