Do you want to plan resources, but worry about your teams actually planning projects?
Workfront’s suite of resource planning tools can help you be more planful and forecast work for your teams, but various steps take time. Here are a few ideas to start stepping towards planning resources and projects and build upon your successes.
- Add Planned Hours to Project Templates - this can be a very quick way to start visualizing the total amount of work being assigned out, and doesn’t require project owners to update every task. (Combined with templated task durations, this also helps enable the use of the Workload Balancer.)
- Use Custom Fields to show the level of work per task - teams who have specific terms for the difficulty or amount of work can use Custom Fields to make sure tasks are labeled and those terms show up on reports and dashboards. This is similar to Work Effort, but without the planned hours (especially if a planned hour estimate is unknown).
- Provide reports or the Workload Balancer to teams and managers - this visibility provides one place to see all tasks for a team or body of work to easily visualize workload and be able to start triaging - with eventually planning work further in the future. Coming this week in 21.1, the Workload Balancer can be used for a Team or a Project, but reports can even further hone and add more custom data to help teams plan resources.
What other ways have you embarked on resource planning and management? What other tips or methods have worked for your organization?
