Time Logs for Project Manager

Question

I am a solutions architect working for a private company. The company would like to associate employees' time logs with their payroll. For instances, if an employee is supposed to deliver 8 hours of work in a day and the employee is logging only 7 hours, then he/she would not be fully paid.

I personally feel it's a blizzard decision of management.

Anyways, my role is solutions architect but I also put on multiple hats: Project Management, Hiring Team, Hands on Development, R&D, Production Support and more.

How do I maintain my Time Sheet? Most of my time will be discussing with team members, attending meetings with stakeholders, interviewing candidates doing R&D on few development challenges, Code-Reviewing and Hands-on-development (it's easy to log hours here).

Any suggestions would be greatly helpful.

FYI: We are already using Azure DevOps (Scrum) for Project Management, but I am not sure how I can come up with my tasks because I will be involved in all tasks of my team members' and more. If I have 6 people in my team and each member is having around 15 tasks in a Sprint, that will be 6*15 = 90 tasks for me. Does it sound right to maintain such a task list for capturing hours?

Answer 1

First of all, you might not be the first person to face this problem at your company. As each company has distinct scenarios and needs, they fastest approach is discussing the problem with other seasoned managers.

In case historical information isn't available then it boils down to why you have to do it. If there isn't exhaustive reviews of hours, a "one billing project fits all" would be ok.

If, however, you have to demonstrate the time invested at different projects, you should ask for project codes before being engaged to help and bill against it the sooner the better. It may become impractical depending on the number of projects (and the customisation offered by the system you use for billing). Being that the case, you need to go back to the company to confirm whether they want you to spend a % of your time booking time.

bottomline: either the company (or other seasoned managers) have a fast solution that allow you to book your time correctly or the company has to absorb the waste of your time with these activities.

Answer 2

The type of work you do, where you cut across many types of tasks in a supply and demand way, you should charge your time against a single level of effort task that cuts across the entire period of performance. You could certainly charge increments of time to each task in a very complex way but I suspect the business would eventually find that level of precision does not provide much value. Your total costs can be apportioned to the tasks in a pro rata way in the event you need to estimate solutions architect level of effort by task.

If you cut across projects, you would have to maintain separate charge codes for them.