Bettina Bot the general reports collection service

At ACS, we collect personal reports from each employee every month. While this this was once done by our chief engeneer manually, we have switched to an automated collection of reports. This is done by Bettina Bot.

As of April 2025 the service also includes some addidtional features and guidance regarding the project and team reporting.

What is the schedule of the report collection?

• 25th of month: personal reporting inital request (deadline 3th eob)
• 1st of following month: 1st recall (deadline 3th eob)
• 3rd of following month: 2nd and final recall (deadline 3th eob)
• 4th of following month:
  • full personal reporting to acs-leitung
  • team personal reporting to teamleaders
  • project related reporting to project-leads, to be reported in project repo until 7th eob
• 8th of following month:
  • project reports to teamleaders, to be aggregated in team report until 13th eob

Personal Reporting

How is my personal report collected?

You will get an email with a request to upload your report. The email will contain a personalized link directly to the upload page. The link will only be valid for you and permanently refers to the month that is explicitly stated in the email. You can and should keep the email with the personalized link in order to view your uploaded report or to edit the content of the report later. If you do not upload your report in time, there will be two additional recall emails with the same link.

Who can see my personal report?

All reports are collected at a central space that can only be accessd by the heads of department. Additionally your teamleader gets a carbon copy of your report. Project contribution is also reported to the project lead. Parts of the personal reporting - regarding project contribution - is forwarded to the project-leads.

How should my personal report look like?

You hand in your report technically in the form of a simple text file. The file is written in markdown - a very easy to use form of structuring information in a simple text file.

While editing you see the file more like plain text:

After uploading the file you will see it with the structure information beeing applied:

Your report consists of three major sections: Work Description, Working Time and Remarks.

Work Description

The section Work Description should contain a brief information about what you actually did and for what purpose. It consinst of four subsections: Project Contribution, Research Progress, Teaching and Institute Services.

Project Contribution

List the projects you are contributing to. Tag your projects with the letter P followed by an ascending number. Add subtasks you did for the project.

Research Progress

List the research topics you did research about. Tag your topics with the letter R optionally followed by an ascending number (if you want to refer explicitly to that topics in your Working Time table). Add some more details.

Teaching

List the names of lectures you have been contributing to. Tag them with the letter T optionally followed by an ascending number (if you want to refer explicitly to that lectures in your Working Time table). Add some more details about your contribution.

Institute Services

There are a lot of possible services you may have done for the institute that do not fit ito any of the other three categories. This is the place to list them. Tag them with the letter S optionally followed by an ascending number (if you want to refer explicitly to that service in your Working Time table). Add some more details about your contribution.

Working Time

The Working Time section consists of a single table where you can refer to your labeled activities and indicate what percentage of your working time was consumed by that activity. You can use the Name column of the table as a mnemonic (easier way to remeber the meaning of the tag).

Remarks

The Remarks section can be used for any kind of remark you may wish to add. However you should always indicate if there was a relevant amount of absense in the reported month.

Is there a report template?

If you haven't uploaded any report via Bettina Bot yet, you will find a link to a template file for your report on the upload page. Otherwise a link to download your previous report is offered.

How do I send a report in advance?

It may happen, that you are on a holiday during the time when the reports typically are collected, and thus are not able to hand in your report as a response to the email request in time. In this case you can upload your report in advance if you use the link from the email request in the previous month. You should see your previous report and below a link preceeded by upload a report for the next period in advance.

Transition in Streamlining Personal and Project Reports

Recently the collection of information from personal reports into project reports has been automated. The goal of this automation is to reduce effort in reporting for our staff. Eventually the project reporting (except for the project lead) should be done completely with the personal report.

In order to support the automated extraction of information and to accelerate the transition please comply to the following notes:

• use the structure as defined above
• include Work Description and Working Time section
• in section Work Description have a subsection Project Contribution
• in subsection Project Contribution on the top level of the nested list only mention the tag and the name of the project the contribution was done for - nothing else
• in the Working Time section there should be nothing but a single table stating all working time percentages
• the Tag column has to match the tags defined in the Project Conrtibution (only for projects)
• the Name column of the table should match with the names of the actual projects (only for projects)
• right after you have submitted your personal report you should look for notices written directly below your report

When you submit a personal report you will get direct feedback about what projects have been recognized for the automated reporting and what will be sent to the project lead. You find this information directly below your submitted report. If something is missing there, you can adapt and reupload your report until everything looks fine.

Project Reporting

What does the project reporting automation do?

The project reporting tool scans the Project Contribution section of all personal reports for names of projects that are part of the Project Reporting repositories in our GitLab. It will collect information from all the personal reports per project and send them to the (internal) project lead together with a request to finish the report and upload it to the repository.

I am project lead and I don't receive request emails, why?

In order to activate automation for a project, the project reporting repository has to contain a file reporter.txt. The file must contain the email address of the project lead in the first line. Does this file exist and is the email address in the first line correct?

What happens when projects end, will the email requests continue?

Requests will continue until there are no new commits to the project reporting repository for 90 days.

Our project has ended, how do I stop the email requests immediately?

You can just remove the reporter.txt file from the repository.