Assigning multiple people/roles to a task with different estimated planned hours

[JohnMi]

Hello, We are fairly new to Workfront (WF) and we were hoping to make each task represent a creative component (Ad, poster, letter, email, webpage….). The issue we are encountering is we cannot create just one task for each creative component if we desire to allocate unequal amount of plan hours to the different roles related to that task (creative component). One of the core things we get out of WF is reporting on planned hours ($) vs Actual hours ($). For example if we have a webpage being created and we expect the planned hours are: Designer - 20 hours Creative Director - 2 hours Proofreader - 2 hours Account Executive - 5 hours PM - 1 hour There does not seem to be a way to assign the different plan hours for the task unless we break it up into 5 different tasks. Has anyone else ran into this and have any suggestions? Thank you, John

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi John, Great question, so many possible answers, and I look forward to hearing other's counsel. For my vote, I encourage you to consider breaking each task out independently, with one role assigned to each (on templates), ready for assignment. In my experience, although more granular, this gives you the best visibility, the least headaches, the most opportunity to "do more later" (such as leveraging our JITR solution to automate the assignment of work once your organization is ready). Regards, Doug

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

In Reply to ....Doug.... Den Hoed:

Hi John, Great question, so many possible answers, and I look forward to hearing other's counsel. For my vote, I encourage you to consider breaking each task out independently, with one role assigned to each (on templates), ready for assignment. In my experience, this granularity gives you the best visibility, the least headaches, and the most opportunity to "do more later" (such as leveraging our JITR solution to automate the assignment of work once your organization is ready). Regards, Doug

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

In Reply to ....Doug.... Den Hoed:

Hi John, Great question, so many possible answers, and I look forward to hearing other's counsel. For my vote, I encourage you to consider breaking each task out independently, with one role assigned to each (on templates), ready for assignment. In my experience, this granularity this gives you the best visibility, the least headaches, and the most opportunity to "do more later" (such as leveraging our JITR solution to automate the assignment of work once your organization is ready). Regards, Doug

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Ehm...sorry about the repetition, folks. Nate B, I'd clicked "edit post" each of the second times to rephrase a sentence, but both were treated as new posts. Methinks there's a bug. Regards, Doug

[NRYNR]

I definitely agree with dot dot dot dot Doug Den Hoed dot dot dot dot.

[EricLu2]

My hand trembles as I type my agreement to Doug’s recommendation below. I really believe the best way to manage this is to have one task per role. I feel trepidation because I know that adds even more tasks to the plan. Nonetheless, I think it is the best way to handle it. We have to replicate tasks when we capitalize some people’s work on a task and don’t capitalize other’s work. Sometimes we co-mingle capitalizable and non-capitalizable deliverables on a task, so we have to split the task up so that the work aligns neatly with capitalization rules. You have another scenario where splitting the task up makes the most sense to me. Sorry! Eric

[JohnMi]

Thanks Doug! That is what we are doing. I just wanted to make sure we were not missing any better solutions.

[JohnMi]

Thanks Lucas! That is what we are doing. I just wanted to make sure we were not missing any better solutions.

[DagmaraGa]

Hi John,

We use to set a task 'Duration Type' as 'Simple' and then in 'Assignments' share Planned Hours as expected in dependency on a role - like on the picture attached.

Hope it helps.

Thanks,

Dags

[GregBe1]

Just be aware that if you have different planned hours per role/user on a task, that if you change the Planned Hours on that task (in-line editing on a task view, say), that it will then equally divide the planned hours among all assigned. We always try to have one user/role owner per task.

[EricLu2]

Greg - That is an excellent point. We’ll divide the hours carefully and unequally amongst the assigned resources, then change the overall planned hours, and bang, our nicely distributed hours are now messed up and equally distributed. That is a good reason to use separate tasks if you are going to have unequal planned hours. Thanks! Eric