A distribution company: a report per department, and a journal of everything the contractor touched

Industry and details changed for confidentiality. We present the customer as a distribution company with warehouses, branches and ordering systems, each of them a department in the report. The question here is not how many hours were worked, but what each department cost and what exactly the contractor did with the data. The answer: a monthly report by department, and three journals kept apart.

Why one total is not enough

In an organization with many departments, one monthly total answers no question. A department head wants to know what their part cost, and finance wants to know how to split the bill.

On this project the work in an ordinary month is split between half a dozen and a little over a dozen departments. The mix changes from month to month, and so does the report.

What each department sees in the report

The month's report in the portal is grouped by department. Each department has its own hours and amount, and can be opened to show the tasks and the time entries behind them. Every line carries the ticket number the customer knows.

Recurring payments such as hosting and subscriptions stand apart from hours, because they answer a different question.

Every line of hours keeps the rate it was recorded at. Changing a rate tomorrow does not rewrite work already done.

The customer reassigns it themselves

Assigning a task to a department is not only the contractor's decision. In the portal report the customer can move a task to another department, the totals are recalculated, and the action is recorded in their activity journal.

On this project about 5% of the customer's actions in the portal are moving a task between departments. Exporting to a file is roughly one action in thirty.

Whoever pays knows which budget the work belongs to. It is good that the decision sits with them, and that it is visible.

The access journal: what the contractor did with the data

Every action by the contractor on the customer's data is recorded: what was created, changed, deleted and taken outside. Viewing a screen is not recorded, and neither are background jobs: no person, no row.

• On this project about six rows in ten are changes, and most of the rest are creations.
• Deletions and exports together are about three percent.
• More than one organization works on the project, and every row says which organization it came from.

A change is written with values only for fields that make sense without context: status, priority, due date, hours estimate. A title or a note is written by field name only, because the journal proves a fact rather than keeping a second copy.

Money in the journal

A small share of rows touches money, on this project fewer than two in a hundred. Whoever is not entitled to see amounts sees the row and the event, but without the values.

Values come off the whole row, not only the money field, because hours or a quantity left beside it would let the amount be reconstructed by subtraction.

Decisions against advice

The third journal is private, and the customer does not see it. It exists for the moment when we warned, a different decision was made, and the problem surfaced two months later.

A record has two shapes: the customer asked for something against our advice, or we warned on our own initiative. Each one states what we advised and what was decided, and it moves through four stages: warned, chose otherwise, problem appeared, resolved.

On this project there are only a few records, of both shapes. That is little, and that is fine: the journal is not meant to record every argument, only the ones that will come back.

What did not work, and what we learned

• A page that was hardly opened. The access journal in the portal was opened so rarely that its menu entry was removed, and the page stays reachable at its address. Transparency nobody looks at is still worth something on the day of a dispute, but it does not replace a good report.
• A task without a department. A task that arrives by sync comes without an assignment. Without regular triage, the report by department gets weaker.
• Month closing with the customer's acceptance exists in the system, and has not been switched on for this project.
• What we learned: record what was changed and what left, not who glanced. One row that answers a real question is worth more than a hundred rows of "opened a list".

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