Business Intelligence Time Tracking Report

2025 Jira Time Tracking Goal

Author

Pearce Solomon

Published

December 19, 2025

Executive Summary

Report Purpose

This report shows the time spent on Non-Project tasks for the year 2025. The goal of the project was to reduce time spent on interruptions by doing the following.

  1. Define interruptions.

  2. Measure current time spent on interruptions using Jira.

  3. Implement plan to reduce time spent on interruptions after consulting with team.

  4. Measure time spent on interruptions after implementing the new solutions.

First, we defined an interruption as a task that is not connected with one of our current projects. In Jira we did this by creating Epics where we would place non-project related issues. To measure the time spent we began using the Time Spent field on issues in Jira. After discussion as a team, we implemented a simple plan to help reduce time spent on interruptions.

  1. Estimate how long a task will take. If it will take more than 4 hours, it should be routed though the manager as a new project rather than a simple task.

  2. Attempt to tackle all extra tasks during a scheduled time during the week.

  3. Log all tasks assigned in Jira

Key Take Aways

Based on the available data, we can see that we managed to both reduce time spent on interruptions and the number of interruptions we received. We must then conclude that the solution agreed on by the team has had a positive impact on the BI Team’s time spent on interruptions.

Analysis

The analysis is split into 3 parts:

  1. Estimated Time: This uses the mean time spent on tasks with data to estimate time spent on tasks that do not have time spent data in Jira.

  2. Exact Time: Represents only the raw time logged in Jira.

  3. Number of Interruptions: This shows the total number of interruptions as defined as non-project tasks.

Data is sourced directly from Jira records that have been placed in the data warehouse (fact_jira_issues_new).

1. Estimated Time Spent

The following visualizations show the estimated hours spent on non-project work. This metric compensates for unlogged time by applying standard duration values to identified non-project tasks. It is clear that time spent on unplanned tasks is estimated to have decreased as the year progressed.

2. Exact Time Logged

This section displays only the raw timespent data recorded in Jira without any imputation for missing logs. This represents the confirmed billable/utilized hours. The same pattern of decreased hours spent as the year progressed is seen here.

3. Number of Interruptions

This section displays the number of interruptions throughout the year. Each Jira issue associated with the Task epics are counted here.

4. Employee Analysis

This section shows the trends of the individuals with Jira Issues on the BI Teams.

Conclusion

1. Limitations

This report has several major limitations. First, we cannot track the source of the issues in Jira (PPD, LPD, RND, FIN, etc.). We also cannot see what kind of interruptions each issue was (bug, enhancement, data warehouse fix, etc.). Another limitation is the adoption rate of the team. There is evidence of uneven adoption in the team meaning we are very likely missing data that team members simply did not add to Jira. Secondly, even if an issue was created in Jira, many issues did not have time tracking data associated with them. Thus, conclusions and decisions based off of this data ought to be taken with these limitations in mind.

2. Summary

The data here, assuming the data is reliable enough to draw conclusions about the overall patterns, shows that the BI Team is being interrupted far less frequently and is therefore spending less time on interruptions. This could be due to several factors.

  1. At the beginning of the year there were many data warehouse issues that caused problems downstream which resulted in many interruptions. Those have since been mitigated.

  2. Spikes issue creation shows evidence that the BI Team was failing to report fully their data as the year went on and would spike their reporting levels after follow-up meetings.

  3. Issue creation in Jira may have changed condensing what used to be multiple issues into a single issue.

  4. As our processes improved over the course of the year, there were in reality, fewer interruptions and less time spent. This could be due to:

    • Introduction of formalized validation

    • The single project

    • Improved schema design in the data warehouse and in MicroStrategy

    • Better dashboard design

    • Faster handling of issues that we gained experience with those issues

    • Better scheduling of when to take care of issues (priority mapping)

Overall, my conclusion is that over the course of the year, the evidence points to fewer interruptions due to process improvements. To supplement this finding, I interviewed the BI Team members to get their perspective on these findings. They also say that they feel that interruptions have become much less frequent and quicker to handle.