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

[NicholeVargas]

First and foremost, a HUGE thank you to Rick @RickCh1 from Western Governors University and Kiersten @KierstenKollins and Nicole @NicoleAlanis from DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse for sharing the details into how they are capturing and reporting on capacity in Workfront. By using innovative approaches and practical solutions, they were able to think outside the box and pull together core functionalities like Home Teams, charts, project templates, and custom fields to proactively understand and track user or team capacity. 

If you weren’t able to join us live, no worries! We have the event recording, slide decks, and summarized resources available for you below. 

• Workshop Recording – apologies for the echo around the 0:55 mark, I wasn’t able to crop that out, so just fast forward! 
• Workfront Slide Deck – includes links to the Gartner Peer Insights Survey, Champion Program, User Groups, and upcoming Events 
• Western Governors University Slide Deck  
• DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse Slide Deck 

Summary of the WGU approach:   

• Custom capacity reporting at the team level (not individual) using planned hours and custom gauges/speedometers to visualize team capacity thresholds. 
• Target maximum of 80% capacity, with a process for project managers to check capacity before moving projects forward, and monthly reporting to leadership. 

Summary of the DSW approach:  

• Built using Workfront and Excel, with custom templates and reports to track capacity by team, role, and marketing channel. 
• Daily/weekly/monthly task templates with zero planned hours, custom forms, and Fusion automations to track capacity against actual work.  

If you have additional tips to share on how you are managing resources outside of the Workload Balancer or Resource Planner, please reply to this post. And if you have questions for Rick, Kiersten, or Nicole, feel free to add it below. 

[Srinija_N]

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

[NicholeVargas]

I can hear the audio, so I'd confirm that the speaker icon in the bottom right is not turned off (muted) and if so, try using a private/incognito window to see if it's a browser issue. Let me know! 

[JamesMa4]

I can hear the audio too.

Thanks Nichole, Cynthia, and Leslie for hosting such a valuable session and for providing all the follow up information. Rick, Kiersten, and Nicole were great and provided valuable insights to help with our resource management journey.

[KristenS_WF]

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.

[KierstenKollins]

@KristenS_WF -

That's awesome you were able to try it out!

Regarding the concern of spreading out the hours, we did encounter that same scenario with our work and how we would manage the span of tasks that go over one day. With our timelines moving rather quickly for our business, a majority of our tasks are 0.5 day to 1 day. When we have a need to have a task span multiple days, we do have to create multiple like tasks set to 1 day each with the planned hours spread out. For example, a 5 day task with 5 hours of planned work would be 5 separate tasks with 1 hour allocated for planned hours to ensure our reports worked how we needed them to.

[KristenS_WF]

Thanks, Kiersten!

We do have an arm of our team that has shorter turn tasks, but many of our projects/tasks are longer.  I do appreciate that you solutioned this consideration, and your charts look great!

I just stumbled across the workPerDate field (apparently available in text mode in both Assignment and Task reports).  It would likely involve data processing outside of WF (which we already do for project milestone reporting as the Milestone view doesn't meet our needs), but it's got me intrigued.

[KierstenKollins]

Thank you for the kudos - our solution has definitely been a labor of love for our team. You intrigued me to to look into that field now too! 

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @KristenS_WF and @KierstenKollins,

Just a quick note of encouragement to confirm that workPerDate is worth pursuing.

I first discovered it about 3 years ago following a major rewrite WF made around Resource Management data storage, and since then have leveraged it to visualize work in many ways.

I am interested to hear what you come up with -- good luck!

Regards,

Doug

[_Manish_Singh]

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.

[_Manish_Singh]

@RickCh1, Could you please provide some guidance in this matter?

[KierstenKollins]

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-e...

[KristinaWa1]

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