Professional engagements and effort reporting

 

As we say on our "What is an IT Professional?" page, you need to be an IT Professional to work through IT4Communities. Your engagements are fully professional engagements - you just don't get paid!

Another aspect of this is reporting back to us when the project is completed. We don't make it compulsory, we couldn't even if we wanted to! But when you do report then please make sure that you capture your full commitment of effort. In a paid professional engagement you would always log the full number of days you spent (and I've worked in body shopping companies where time is logged by the hour - even for projects which are months long). It is important to a commercial company that all time is billed for obvious reasons.

But it is important to us that you report the days you spend fully too. It's one of the parameters that yield our famous "Value delivered" figure of £3,000,000 since 2002. (More about how this is calculated in the Research and reports section of our website.)

Our funding is, as you know, precarious at the moment and one argument we have for funding in future is that value delivered figure.

So "don't under- or over-bill - even when you aren't getting paid". You may be helping a voluntary organisation but your effort is worth full professional recognition. Give us call or post on our social website groups if you have thoughts about this.

John Davies, Programme Director