[Event Follow-Up] Creative Ways of Managing Resources in Adobe Workfront - May 20, 2025

I am unable to hear any audio in the Workshop recording, Is is only me or same for everyone?

I did a very limited/preliminary attempt at the DSW approach in our sandbox preview--creating an allocation project with 4 tasks (with weekly hour allocations) for the 4 full weeks in June, all assigned to a single job role.

I've tried both task and assignment reports; I'm able to get the basic approach--columns of planned hours per week that contrast with a line graph charting the values from the allocation project.

The issue I'm having is that values in my columns can vary (sometimes substantially) from the totals I see in Planner/Workload Balancer.  I'm guessing it's because I'm forced to use discrete measurements (e.g., task planned completion date) in the report for filters/groupings/chart metrics, while the built-in resourcing tools reflect work spread out over time.

I'm just trying to anticipate concerns that my team's admins/project managers are going to raise.

Does anyone know how to display an Excel sheet using external links in the capacity dashboard as discussed at 8:50? Basically, an Excel sheet that is present in SharePoint.

Thank you to the CS at Scale team for having the DSW team! @nicolealanis and I had a blast sharing our resource management story with you all.

There were so many great questions from the chat that we were not able to answer live, but I have provided answers to several of them here.

• I'm not following - so this template is a reference for tasks/roles/planned hrs info for projects?
• I'm not understanding how all the setup and back-end work enables these reports / charts?
• Not clear on how the background template worked
  • The allocation projects are a way for our team to be able to assign our available capacity by day, week and month to our roles. They also allow us to see how much capacity we have for our marketing channels (design only). By utilizing the tasks within the allocation project, we are able to make the connection to our creative project reports by pulling in the capacity number from our custom task fields within our reporting. Refer to slide 18 in the deck to see how this comes together with the report setup to be able to pull in a capacity trend line.
• How do these dummy tasks not break your project timelines?
  • Since the dummy tasks live independently in their own project, our channel asset projects are not impacted in any way. The dummy tasks serve as a way for us to be able to target our resources (designer or copywriter) and provide us the available capacity we have for the day, week and month. One additional thing we do is place these allocation projects in their own program so we are able to filter out this program when we would like to not have these dummy tasks pull into other types of reporting.

• Where are your users logging their time?

  • Our users do not log time. Our current planned hours are provided from time studies that we have held with our creative team and planned hours are adjusted accordingly within the templates. The time study data is analyzed by operations and in partnership with creative, aligned upon for the best estimate of time needed to complete tasks based on type of work by channel and expected volume (how many versions or assets being created in the project).

• This is all planned hours but do actual hours come into either of these examples?
• We are at the beginning stages of using the log time feature in Workfront for a time study, but I can confirm this same model does work for actual hours. Example report and report set up provided below.

   

   

• How is the work coming in? who manages input?
• Our channel project managers will create and kick off project briefs in Workfront – we do not use requests. Our traffic team is the first step in our process and they will review the brief, review the timeline and assign the resources to the project. They partner with the project manager and/or with creative partners as needed if there are changes needed to the timeline and/or adjustments to the task planned hours.
  • To learn more, check out this Expert Insights post where I discuss our non-traditional ways of working in Workfront. https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/workfront-discussions/video-august-2024-workfront-expert-insights-non-traditional/m-p/694315#M3338

I have a reporting question that I am hoping one of you reporting geniuses could help with. I’ve started building a capacity report modeled after what DSW did. I have my capacity project set up with weekly tasks and a custom form to fill out our teams capacity. I was also able to create the report that shows task planned hours versus capacity. 

Where I’d love to take this further is by adding actuals, since our teams log time in Workfront, I’d like to show those hours in the same report. Ideally, I’d love to have a second bar or line chart that shows the actual hours logged to their timesheets.

My challenge is that I had to create some capacity tasks that have planned hours in them to have the report account for work our team does that is not part of a project or have a task associated to it. Things like client meetings, other account/project management items, pre-sales, and queues. So I have these capacity tasks that will not have any time logged to them because we created a time tracking project under all of our client portfolios with tasks that we call general client buckets so we can still track this time and contribute it specific clients. We have done time studies on these and have our monthly averages that we then plugged into a googlesheet along with data from WF for resource planning, but I am hoping a WF report can replace that.

I feel like I am running into a task report versus and hours report issue. 

So I think I am hitting a wall between what can be shown in a task report versus an hours report.

Is there a way to incorporate a third data set into the report to show actual time logged, even if it’s logged to different tasks/projects than the ones shown in the current report?

Thank you in advance,

Kristina