Allocation planning for team assignments

[#1]

We have been individually assigning users to tasks so far, but we would like to switch to team assignments, allowing designers to grab from a team queue. (this would save us a lot of time). The issue is that team assignments show as unassigned in the scheduling tab, and thus don't show allocation. Without it, we can't determine if specific days are over-allocated for the team.

I would love a way to visualize how the current backlog of team assigned work sits on a day by day basis. Without this we can't judge if due dates are reasonable.

[#2]

Hi Brian - We use fake people (like NY Designer Person) so that we can see the hours by day, week, month, quarter (depending on tool being used by the RM) and easily see who has time for it.

Something to know too, hours are not assigned to teams. So even if you get hours in the unassigned area, this won't work for team assignments.

There might be an idea for this already, but you might want to add one saying that hours can be assigned to a team and then transfer to whomever picks up the task.

[#3]

good call Anthony. We could definitely set up a fake person to assign work to per team, but on your side, does that then go to a project manager to assign directly to a designer/ designers, or are you giving permissions for low level workers to reassign material from the dummy?

I ask because the "team requests" tab of People is a useful way for our designers to grab their work, but only if we can determine our overall team allocation. If we assign to a fake user we lose that simple "work on it" interface.

[#4]

Yeah, for our Shared Services teams, team requests are great because anyone can pick them up. It works for us because those types of departments don't care about resource management in the sense of planned hours. It is usually for requests that come in and so the reports are about how many requests came in. (And to be fair, they tend to be the Issue object type, not task)

For roles we actually resource in our project schedules, there is usually a RM or Department Lead that makes the decision on who will work on a project. So they can see the hours across time for a whole project for that role in the Resource Girds (well, Planner now) and then once a decision is made, they go in and use the Action tool in the Staffing tab to switch NY Designer Person with Sally Sampleperson on that project.