Recording and allocation of human capital cost for IT staff.
Large global bank.
Every product margin, service cost and AI business case that leaves out engineering time is wrong, and the missing line is the biggest one. It stays missing for three reasons.
HR, payroll, the project tool and the timesheet tool. None of them speak to the cost model, so getting labor in is a custom integration, and it does not happen.
Most time tracking exists to bill a client for hours. It does not allocate cost to an internal consumer, it does not know what a cost center is and it stops at the invoice.
Showing where people’s time goes surfaces uncomfortable data. Without an approval chain and role-based access, the program stalls at the first objection.
A cost model without labor is a cloud bill with extra steps.
Product margins that include engineering cost, and the capex and opex split by project, with the trail to support capitalization.
Labor in the staffing cost pool, mapped to towers and services and allocated by actual effort rather than a fixed percentage.
What each project and service costs to run, people included, and whether the portfolio is on budget and returning what was promised.
Where engineering effort goes, by project and by role, without a timesheet culture that engineers refuse to use.
Its share of the cost, approved by them, with the hours behind it in view.
Four capabilities carry this. Data Studio, Analytics and AI Studio come with every one of them.
Actual hours against approved projects and activities, with budget controls, beneficiary splits and a two-level approval chain. Forward capacity and demand planning sit beside it.
Labor into the TBM staffing cost pool, mapped to towers and services, so service cost is fully loaded.
Labor allocated to any cost object on any driver, including non-IT shared services, using the same rates as everything else.
Workforce planning by role, grade or individual, in FTEs by period, so hiring and attrition are in the plan and measured against actual effort.
Every resource carries a cost driver. Once time is logged and approved, actual labor cost flows into the allocation model and out to cost centers and beneficiaries, with no export and no integration project.
Contractors, suppliers and outsourced teams are captured as alternative resources, with a named time capturer logging for them. A significant share of technology labor sits there.
Each project carries a billing type, a budget in hours or amount, an alert threshold and a hard stop when the budget is exceeded. Several business units can co-fund one project with agreed splits, and the project cannot go live until every funder approves its share.
Two independent approvals: funders approve the project before any time is logged, and the line manager, cost center owner or project manager approves the timesheet afterward. Nobody approves their own time, and each role sees only what its function needs.
Time is captured against a project and its activities. The rate follows how labor is priced: a blended rate per cost center, an individual rate per resource or a rate per type such as contractor or senior analyst, and each project chooses which applies. Approved hours multiplied by that rate give the allocated labor cost, which lands on the project, the activity and the beneficiaries that funded it. The project also carries its own commercial terms: time and materials, fixed fee or not billed.
Resource Planner allocates people to projects, activities and applications ahead of time, by month, against a budget, forecast or actual scenario. Where time capture is not in place, planned effort at the applicable rate is how labor cost reaches the model. Organizations that already run an external time-capture tool can import the allocations and still get the costing.
Cost against budget, health, risk, benefit, return and strategic alignment for each project, with effort by role and by person, internal against external and capex against opex, all read from the same allocated model.
Approved hours, at the resource’s rate, against the project and activity, split across the beneficiaries that funded it, with the project’s own terms attached: time and materials, fixed fee, a budget in hours or amount and a hard stop at the threshold.
Planned allocations of people to projects, activities and applications, by month, against a budget, forecast or actual scenario, costed at the applicable rate. The labor cost of a project before the first timesheet, and the costing method where timesheets do not exist.
The TBM taxonomy defines the staffing cost pool and its five sub-pools: internal labor, internal labor capital, staff augmentation, staff augmentation capital and other operating. It maps labor to resource towers, and this page fills that structure. Labor and services is one of the seven spend categories, and this page is its front door.
