Annual staffing plans in Workfront

[RobSc]

Does anyone have experience or advice about using Workfront to store all scoped hours for the entire agency and then make them avaiable to use on projects? I'm looking for a functional solution that allows "deposits" and "withdrawals" like a bank.

1. Import and store all scopes into Workfront in the form of planned hours (deposits).
2. Create/plan projects as usual but have the planned hours in the project reduce the overall sum in the bank (withdrawals).

Thoughts on this

There would have to be a container of hours that are kept separate from the working projects. If the bank is a project then creating a custom status could work to filter it out of working project reports.

The bank project and the working project would have to be aware of each other so that their planned hours stay in sync, one drawing from the other in a zero sum fashion.

The solution would have to be reportable to track variance in scoped hours, project planned hours, and project actual hours.

Thanks for your help!

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Rob,

You definitely can do a lot with custom statuses and data, and we have a few solutions along this line that might interest you and/or give you some ideas:

• Budget Vs Actuals lets you set your Portfolio, Program, and/or Project level budgets for the upcoming year, then monitor Budget vs Actual dollars and % throughout the year
• Capacity Charts lets you configure highly customizable stacked charts to visualize changes in capacity vs planned vs actual project information over various time ranges.
• Resource Contouring lets you visualize and manage resources using rollup Hours by Day, Week, or Month with no “Special Math” required.

If you think any of these might be a fit, I invite you to email me at doug.denhoed@atappstore.com

Regards,

Doug

[KatherineLa]

Hi Rob,

I did something similar to what you're describing in the context of financial data, thought my notes might help. I had a custom form that had fields corresponding to the various budget items we needed to report to a client on - # of jobs executed, PM cost, extra fees etc. That form attached to each production job, and was completed normally by the team. Another master project existed that had the same form attached, but filled out with the total budget - how many jobs were included in the overall SOW etc. The trick in that form is that all the values were negative, so a contract with 30 deployments had a budget of "-30".

From there, I could build a report that pulled those columns for every project, sorting my master budget project at the top. When I told the reporting tool to sum the total of the columns, what I got was the total budget offset by however many projects were executed. So a budget of -30 that had three projects executed showed a remaining budget of -27.

It wasn't perfect, but it met the need in the moment since I couldn't find a way to tell the reporting tool to subtract one group of items from another in quite the way I wanted. I'm betting there are more elegant solutions with textmode, but it was not in my bandwidth to figure out at that point.

Hoping this points you in a possible direction?

Katherine