Allocating for Off Site Video Shoots

[DaveKo]

Situation

• Our video team travels a few times a month for video shoots. Most of the time when they are on shoots, they are not available to work on other projects. Our current process is to add a task for the shoot and assign each videographer a full day’s worth of hours (6 hours in this case) to account for this time.

Problem

• Other projects / tasks are still being scheduled during their “shoot days” so this causes them to be overallocated because if hours for another project were already allotted to those days prior to assigning a shoot, then Workfront wouldn't know to prioritize the shoot hours and rearrange the hours of the other task(s) that landed on those days.

One solution that we thought of is for the team to block it off as an out of office day, but then they wouldn’t be able to log hours / account for the shoot day. If you could provide best practice / insight here, we would appreciate it!

Thoughts?

[RandyRoberts]

I think that because Workfront allows you to double-book someone if you desire (and I agree with that approach) you're not going to solve this with a technical solution. If you look at the Worload Balancer, you can easily see where the user is overbooked. From there you can "balance" the workload by re-assigning or moving the task date.

If the app were to not allow double-booking, how would it know which task was the right one to keep? The first one? What if the first one was the one you didn't want? If the answer is priority, what if both tasks were "urgent, or medium? Then which one would it keep? You can see from those quick examples the new problems it would cause.

I would recommend using the balancer to "balance" the workload manually, giving you the choices instead of an algorhythm that may very well be not what you intended.

[DaveKo]

Thanks Randy.   

I am also looking into how the system utilizes Default Schedule vs. User Schedule, and the difference and impact of FTE versus the new Work Time field.

Dave

[RandyRoberts]

I'd start here: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/workfront/using/administration-and-setup/set-up-wf/configure...

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @DaveKo,

As @RandyRoberts shared, there are a lot of considerations involved in balancing work, which is why most resort to having a trained and insightful human do so manually. That said:

Many years ago, at a client far, far away…

Some savvy but overstretched Workfront SysAdmins had us build a solution that automated the assignment of work in certain well defined cases. By having the computer take care of that drudgery for those routine items, those SysAdmins could then focus more time and attention on the trickier assignments: as I recall, they went from spending 4 days a week planning next week to 1 day a week.

The solution requires several prerequisites:

- projects must be prioritized

- tasks of interest need one role on them

- users of interest must have those same roles assigned

- default and user schedules will be honored, as will personal time off

- tasks planned dates will be honored

- task work (in hours) must be entered and will be honored

- no planned dates will be automatically moved (although we dabbled in automatic pushing, that proved to be a bridge too far)

- no person will be assigned more work than their scheduled capacity permits (eg 40 hrs / week)

- preference is given to a user already previously assigned to a project (ie since they are familiar with it)

- in cases where there are not enough user hours to cover all of the task hours, some tasks will necessarily be left unassigned, but by design, those will be the tasks on the projects with lower priority….to which the trained and insightful humans can then attend, comforted, though, in knowing that all such tasks on higher priority projects have indeed already been automatically assigned as efficiently as possible

With that all in mind, we created a diagram of how the solution functions here (In the Media and Files sections).

If you think this type of automated work assignment might be a good fit for your organization, I’d be happy to chat further at doug.denhoed@atappstore.com

Regards,

Doug

[Madalyn_Destafney · Accepted solution]

Even if they mark those dates as Time Off in their profile, they should still be able to log hours to tasks/projects on those days…Time Off doesn’t restrict a user from logging time…