Accounting for time spent in meetings in Workfront

[mmcgovern]

Hi all! My team at Deloitte primarily works from home, but in our current climate we are seeing ourselves spend more and more time on the phone in Zoom/Skype/Teams meetings. This time eats up our capacity as a team and makes it difficult to understand everyone's availability without accidentally making them work 10-12 hours per day.

I'm interested in an integration with Outlook that would achieve the following:

• When a meeting is added to an individual's outlook calendar, a task is added to Workfront to reflect the meeting
• The planned start date and planned completion date of the task reflect the date, start time, and end time of the meeting. For example, if I have a meeting on 4/22 from 10-11, then a task would appear for me with a planned start date of 4/22 at 10 am and planned completion date of 4/22 at 11am
• Planned hours and duration would reflect length of the task
• The task auto-completes once the duration is over so the user doesn't have to manually update
• If a meeting is cancelled then the task is deleted
• If a meeting is moved then the task is updated to reflect the new date and time
• All this information flows into the resource planner and scheduler

Currently, each member of my team spends ~4-6 hours per day in meetings with various stakeholders and across different projects. If that is not reflected in Workfront, then I don;t have a business case for getting off the phone or hiring new team members to meet demand.

Has anyone had any success achieving the above? If so, what middleware did you use and how did you go about it?

[mmcgovern]

@Lauren Quincey‚ and @Ryan Kish - Inactive‚, @Josh Slagowski‚ - FYI

[Heather_Kulbacki]

I don't have any solution for this, but for capacity planing this would be an amazing integration!

With the current integration with the calendar on Home already showing on your meetings on in Workfront, taking it to this next level by auto-creating a task or something to show up in capacity would be great.

Even if it doesn't take it all the way to creating a task, but at least a checkbox somewhere to indicate that we want to account for Outlook-created (or Google) meetings in capacity. Maybe in the resource planner meeting time would show up differently but still figure into the capacity for each day.

[catherineh70969]

We approach this by using Hour Type/Timesheet solution. Basically, we've created an hour type to bucket time spent in meetings/design team collaboration and can use this in reporting to understand the impact.

It's not ideal for every use case, but does provide a basis for quantifying staffing needs. HTH

[mmcgovern]

Hey Catherine - but that only gets you to the actuals right? How do you plan for it ahead of time?

[glenncat]

This would be an excellent integration. Today, you can get about 90% there but do have to jump into Workfront to add the planned hours (which means having a plan license).

[MattYo]

@PM Workfront - Inactive‚ Is there any plans on creating this type of functionality? My team deals with Recurring meetings that is currently a manual adjustment anytime this is moved or cancelled. We want to capture this time for resource management. Are there any work arounds that you would recommend in the meantime.

[SamTaylor]

Hello Matt, hope all is well.

This may be something our native integration team looks at more deeply but I wanted to let you know that it is likely that this type of integration could already be accomplished using Workfront Fusion.

The trigger event would be create or update of an event. From what I see, the MSFT 365 and Google Calendars APIs would support this even with manual adjustments.

The Fusion scenario would need to determine if the event already exists as a task in Workfront and handle different types of changes (delete, date/time change, attendee changes, etc.)

I think one of the most challenging aspects will be access to the calendars. If using Fusion it would be a question of what access is needed by the Fusion connection to access the calendars you want to work with.

Best of luck, I would love to hear more if you pursue this.