Centralized scheduling- limiting who can assign tasks

[SandraEl2]

For those of you with a separate resource management department, do you have issues with project owners scheduling people directly for their projects? In our organization, our PMs can't schedule anyone. They send requests to the resource managers and we make the booking assignments. Our project managers take their jobs very seriously and if it was left up to them, they would grab their favorite people or double book them to meet deadlines. Since there's no way to give PMs all rights to edit/maintain their project plans without allowing them to make assignments on the tasks, do you have trouble keeping them from doing this? Have you found any workarounds? Sandra Ellaneous Thomson Reuters Elite

[DavidCo3]

Hi Sandra, That sounds very similar to our organisation currently. Our PMs would love to be able to assign resources, but they are not allowed to. We have no way of preventing them from doing it in Workfront, other than it is auditable (we have setup some integration-based alerts which are triggered if they do it) and they will get to spend some quality time with a cranky manager if they do it. In addition to the lack of controls, there's not much in the way of workflow in the tools at the moment in terms of PMs flagging which tasks are ready for resources to be assigned. You can do this at a project level for all tasks, but sometimes the tasks are resourced at different times. My understanding is that some time next year (hopefully 19.1) a custom data filter will become available in the scheduling tool. Once this happens, it would allow a PM to flag a task as needing resources assigned, so it would hit the workflow of the resourcing team via filters applied in the Scheduling tool. We've been waiting a long time for this.....it can't come soon enough. Regards, David Cornwell

[SandraEl2]

Thank you David. It does sound very similar to our situation. Your idea of an alert when someone changes a resource sounds like the best workaround. We're struggling too with the ability to flag only specific tasks which are ready to resource. Our partial workaround is to use a custom status to designate the tasks ready to be scheduled, then a separate dashboard displays those tasks for the resource managers. The major drawback to this is that once we head over to the Resource Scheduler, there's no way (as you said) to filter for specific tasks. Our group is used to processing large volumes of resource requests. Large volume processing requires an efficient system. The inability to filter at the task level greatly increases time spent identifying those tasks. I was going to provide a couple links to Enhancement requests in the Idea Exchange so others can upvote the filtering capabilities, but I just discovered there are several. I took a screenshot of them. :-) Sandra Ellaneous Thomson Reuters Elite