Overview of Activities

Time Management can track actual time not only at the work item level, but also at a more granular level, using activities you define that are meaningful to your organization. The same activity can be used by any combination of work item types you specify—requests, projects, tasks, packages, and miscellaneous. This information can be useful for reporting of total work by multiple resources on each activity, and for future planning estimates.

Common activities include the following:

  • Design

  • Design review

  • Coding

  • Testing

In a time sheet policy, you can specify whether or not users are allowed to specify activities for any work items when they enter time on their time sheets. If allowed, you can require users to specify activities for any particular work item types. See Configure the Activities tab.

You can also define activities specifically for assets. However, the time sheet policy does not provide a separate option to require that users specify activities for asset work items. Instead, in the time sheet policy, you can require that users specify activities for request work items in general (see Configure the Activities tab). Assets are a type of request.

You can use activities to track capitalization for SOP 98-1 compliance. The SOP 98-1 functionality must be enabled for the activities to be marked as capitalized and for projects and tasks associated with those activities to track capitalization data. For information about SOP 98-1 functionality and using activities to track capitalized costs, see the Financial Management User Guide.

Note: To create or edit activities, you must have the Config: Edit Activities access grant.

If entry of activities is enabled on a user's time sheet policy Activities tab, then after selecting a time sheet line and clicking Line Details, the user adds activities to time sheet lines on the Charge Codes/Activities tab. If entry of activities is disabled in the time sheet policy, the tab name is Charge Codes rather than Charge Codes/Activities and no section for activities is shown.

Note: If a task in a work plan has a specified activity, that task can have only that one activity and users cannot change it or add any other activity to it. If a task in a work plan has no specified activity, users can select and add one or more predefined activities to that task on their time sheets. Multiple activities are not transferred to the work plan, but their total time is.