Effort Allocation Categories:

Administer - Purchasing, budgeting, personnel management, contract and grant administration, meeting scheduling. While this category is used primarily by managers and administrative staff, it should be used for any administrative and secretarial activities including product pricing, schedule coordination, accounting, invoicing, interviewing and hiring, videoconference setup, etc.

Communicate - E-mail, phone mail, staff and team meetings, PCC meeting, project status reports. Use for meetings that cover a variety of. Include interaction with project stakeholders and users, as well as vendors. If individual email messages require a lengthy amount of time to respond, that task might fit under Document, Fix, or other depending on the context.

Create - System creation, installation, development, feature enhancement, analysis, project planning and management, resource planning, grant requests/writing. This category is used for activities, including project planning and management, issues or bug lists (non-production), that are directly tied to the creation of a new system. Meetings with customers that are part of the system creation process would be included here. Other Create activities include task montioring, specifications, prototyping, network design and installation.

Document - System documentation, user reference documentation, flow-charts, system diagrams.  This inlcudes documents written for general reference purposes for systems or processes. Training-specific documentation fall under "Teach."

Fix - Bug fixes, troubleshooting, unexpected system repair work, on-call, issues lists (production). Fixes are primarily unexpected activities, including the creation and maintenance of issues lists, since issues represent things that need to be fixed. On-call rotations include only actual time spent. Most time spent on Trouble Tickets fit in this category.

Fix - Bug fixes, troubleshooting, unexpected system repair work, on-call, issues lists (production). Fixes are primarily unexpected activities, including the creation and maintenance of issues lists, since issues represent things that need to be fixed. On-call rotations include only actual time spent. Most time spent on Trouble Tickets fit in this category.

Learn - Training, professional development, conferences, brown-bag, new technology research.  Knowledge transfer activities, researching technologies, reading, etc. would be a learning activity.

Leave - Sick, vacation, personal preference, jury duty, leave without pay.  Leave time can be "pre" and "post" entered into the timecard.

Maintain - System maintenance, routine upgrades, configuration, account creation, scheduled system downtime.  Expected activities as well as day-to-day service activities and processes required to keep systems afloat. Data maintenance including cleanup, exceptions, managing tablespaces, schemas, etc. Unexpected activities are captured under Fix.

Plan - Strategic planning, environmental and technical planning not tied to a specific project.&nsp;Broad planning activities that are not tied to a specific project. Project planning and management are recorded under Create, Maintain, or other pertinent categories.

Represent - Committee membership, including HSC, University campus, community or industry groups. Representation of ITS and/or Health Sciences on committees that covers general or broad initiatives. Specific project team membership, is captured under Create or other pertinent categories.   Internal ITS committees are categorized by the Committee Chair.

Teach - Instructing, hosting brown-bags, user coaching, mentoring, tutoring.  Any knowledge transfer activity, including mentoring or coaching on coding, programming styles and methodologies, etc. Time spent creating written materials that are specifically for training purposes, as well as time preparing and setting up for classes is entered in this category.

Test - System testing, load testing, browser and usability testing. Time spent writing test scripts and coordinating user test groups.

Other - Activities that do not fit into any of the above categories, such as non-ITS funded academic work or research would be included here.