Budgeted Hours
We have recently adopted the Resource Planner to allocate the amount of time we would like each team member to work on a particular client. For context.....
We have not adopted a fully task based approach ( ie: create and assign a task for every piece of client work we do ) , instead we have a very simple approach that allows us to be malleable and efficient. We use projects aligned to our clients and then tasks to define the products and services we provide for the client. Our team members simply add these to their timesheets and track time as needed. This is a very easy approach that captures the information we need ( Actual hours ) and works well for us at this time.
Where we are now is that we need to capture the Planned work. To meet this requirement we use Budgeted Hours in the Resource Planner to align each user in our teams to the clients they work on and allocated them a set number of "budgeted hours" for each client. This is the time over the course of the month we expect them to work on that client.
With this information in place we can then report ( sadly not in Workfront ) on Budgeted ( how much time we planned/aimed to work on each client ) versus Actual ( time we actually worked for the client ).
Whilst onboarding he teams I noticed that the Resource Planner is soley aligned to a user job role and not the user. If the users job role is changed ( what happens a lot in our agency ) then all budgeted hours both current and future and historic will be removed. This has a significant impact and essentially renders the Resource Planner useless - even for a very simple approach like ours.
I have spent some time looking at work arounds and the only way to mitigate the impact is to firstly run a budgeted hours report against the effected user(s) make the changes and then re-add their hours against their new role. As we grow and move forward with our adoption of the Resource Planner the effort involved in simply retaining data accuracy is going to become a huge effort simply when a job role is changed.
I think there needs to be a total rethink on budgeted hours and the resource planner functionality in general. Hours should be aligned to the individual user and not the job role. Like wise a wider rethink is needed on the User View. This is completely ring-fenced towards task based efforts. How come you can budget hours against a project or role but not a user? It makes no sense.
% Utilisation
As an agency its important to us to be able to understand staff utilisation yet we have to use external reports and other methods to acquire this information as the very feature available in Workfront is only available to those who create individual tasks for every piece of work. The annoying this is all the metrics are there in Workfront.
- User Availability
- Budgeted hours
- Actual Hours
- % Utilization
Sadly it is not possible to view this information in a combined meaningful way. This ( in my opinion ) renders the Resource Planner nothing more than a gimmick that provides no real or meaningful benefit to the Workfront offering.
To summarise:
- You can budget hours ( but don't change users roles )
- % Utilisation for budgeted vs available hours - not available
We are a rapidly expanding agency desperate to adopt Workfront as our primary platform but this lack of development insights and are making user buy-in difficult and challenging. Theres no real point adopting a system if it makes your work day harder not easier.
Workfront has some brilliant functionality and does provide value but the Resource Planner is letting the side down with the lack of simple business metrics reporting and offerings.
