Question

I spend very little time programming nowadays and tend to focus on big-picture stuff like planning, meetings, supervision, and sales. However, I'd like to be transparent with my staff as to where my attention is going as well as "lead by example" by using FogBugz to track my activities.

I've taken to creating broad tracking tasks such as "Sales Activities October 2009". Unfortunately unless I provide explicit estimates I'm unable to indicate that I'm currently working on it.

I realize this sounds flaky - I would expect a programmer to track time against a dev task without estimates - but it's very difficult given the context of my job to predict exactly where within that "sphere" I'll be spending my time.

Are there any best-practices for managers tracking their time and efforts within FogBugz?

Answer 1

This would also be helpful for people using the Working-On for more than time keeping. For example, using the FNN plug-in. (How's that for a plug of a plug-in?)

Answer 2

Why don't you just ignore the estimates? Just give it some random value. If you're not using these estimates to actually predict deliveries and such based on your own tasks then why not ignore them?

Answer 3

I do quite a few tasks that I want to generate accurate estimates for (and to help feed the Monte Carlo simulation), so I put in the amount of time I expect to work on it during the next week and then each time I revisit the task and if I am going over I adjust the estimate upwards. I am hoping this keeps the Time Estimation & Monte Carlo simulation fairly accurate.

Answer 4

I handle this by making broad estimates of how much time I think I will be spending on non-programming tasks. So, given the following breakdown:

• 25% of time: Support for Project X
• 25% of time: Support for Project Y
• 50% of time: Development (working on individual cases in multiple projects)

I create the following "Schedule Item" cases:

• Project X Support (2010)
• Project Y Support (2010)

... and give estimates to each of 25% of my year, say 75 days.

I don't care too much about the accuracy of my initial estimate (I ignore these cases for EBS purposes) but it's still useful to track my time for transparency (your reason) and for invoicing purposes.

You can create new "Support" cases each year (or month, or quarter or whatever suits you) or just not worry about the estimates at all and give the same Support case with a nominal estimate.

Hope this helps.