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Job Numbers – Do’s and Don’ts
Ben from Rally the Data has provided the following article to make better use of your job numbers and to avoid common pitfalls when linking to reporting apps like PowerBi.
Do be systematic
Job numbers are essential for efficiently managing projects, tasks, and resources within any job management system. So, be systematic. Once you’ve established a clear and consistent style for job numbers, document it and train the team to use the system. Include checks on job numbers as part of your regular audits and use staff permissions to avoid unauthorised changes.
Do use a consistent format
By using a clear and consistent format for job numbers, your team will spend less time finding jobs and more time working on jobs. Make sure that team members understand the format, where to find jobs, and how to enter new ones. Most job management systems have some logic to automatically create job numbers, where possible utilise this.
Our tip – always start a job with an alphabetic prefix, such as “J0123” instead of “0123”. This will avoid errors if you have jobs like “0123” and “123” for example, in the case that your job management system treats these as actual numbers, which is more common than you might expect.
Do include relevant information about the job’s nature
It’s fine to include your important elements into job numbers such as team codes or project types. The key is to keep your job numbers consistent and avoiding them becoming unwieldy. A job number is an identifier, so its format should be easily searchable. Make use of job names, categories or descriptions to store more detailed job information.
Don’t use special characters
Your job management system needs to store and reference your job data, and the job number is often an identifier. While most systems can handle special characters most of the time, there are times when they will fail. Avoid using characters that may interfere with URLs, such as commas (,), full stops (.), forward or back slashes (/ or \), quotes or double quotes (‘ or “), hashes (#), and white space characters (tabs, spaces, or enters).
Dashes (-) or underscores (_) are safer options if you need to break up job numbers. But use with caution as not all dashes are the same. Hyphens (-), n-dashes (–), and m-dashes (—) are all different characters.
Don’t use easily confused Characters
An upper-case I (i) can look a lot like a lower-case l (L), while a capital O can appear like the number 0. Steer clear of characters which can be easily confused and avoid using leading zeros.
