Role and Task Categories are used to group people and tasks into categories so that we can make meaningful sense of data.
Role Categories are how you break your team into subsets of roughly interchangeable roles. This is typically done based on type of work involved and often align to titles such as Designer, Developer, Strategist, Project Manager, etc. It could also follow other structures like departments, teams, etc.
We use Role Categories to categorize each team member on the Payroll Grid. These are then used to create the groupings that are used to forecast your delivery capacity for each Role.
Task Categories represent a related concept, but instead of categorizing people, Tasks organize the work itself. For example, projects might be broken into broad Tasks such as Design, Development, Strategy, Project Management, Quality Assurance, etc.
The key questions that Task Categories should answer are: “What buckets do you use to estimate the time for a project?” and “What buckets do you use to track time?”
We use Task Categories to break down estimates for projects, which are then entered on the Project Grid. These groupings are then used to map planned work to capacity to do that work.
In simple cases, your Role Categories and your Task Categories will map perfectly to each other. That is, a Designer only does Design, a Developer only does Development, etc.
Simple Role Category-Task Category Mapping
We recommend that you start with this approach to get some initial success gaining key insights from your systems. The other big advantage with this plan is that it dramatically reduces the complexity of time tracking data since we can bypass the need to enter task metadata on each time entry and simply infer where it belongs based on the person’s role from the Payroll Grid.
In more complex cases, it won’t be so straightforward. For example, you may have a task like QA that multiple different Roles contribute to (a Designer does some QA design, one Developer QA’s another Dev’s code, a Writer QA’s content, etc.) In this case, you need to assign each Role a percentage of their time to the QA Task Category.
More Complex Role Category-Task Category Mapping
These mappings will be used to more accurately calculate capacity for each category of planned work.