Hi Melanie - I was going to start a thread on this too. I have quite a lot of experience with it (not all good unfortunately!). We have users across multiple timezones in Australia, Asia, Europe, USA and a few other places in between.
Non-working days on the Time Off tab can show on the wrong days, depending on whether your PC is set in the same timezone as the person you are looking at (or close to it). This is because Workfront shows you the day (your time) when the person is not working - not the day (their time) that they are not working. This of course means that for anyone managing teams across major timezone differences, it causes problems.
The Resource Grid (and Team Builder) shows resource availability and utilisation based on the viewer's PC timezone, rather than the resource you're looking at. This is the same underlying issue/behaviour as above.
From a resource Availability point of view, it sort of makes sense mathematically, but not so much practically. e.g. if I am in Australia and looking at a resource in Italy, Workfront shows that they are available to work some hours on Saturday (my time), when in reality they don't work Saturday (their time). Our global scheduling team would like to be able to clearly see which project timezone they are scheduling for and what the availability of the local resources is in that local timezone.
From a Utilisation point of view, Workfront also applies the same logic, but this is where it is really impractical. It shows the percentage (or hours) the resource was utilised on each day of the week based on the viewer's timezone on their PC, rather than the resource they're looking at. For us to generate an accurate utilisation report of our Italian or UK teams, we have to change our PC timezone to Italy or UK first, then run the reports and then change them back to eastern Australian time before we can report on Australian users. Creating Utilisation reports for resources across multiple timezones at the same time generates some wierd and inaccurate results.
It is fiendishly complicated when you start thinking about how it really should work, however simply from a user's point of view they need to be able to schedule resources in other timezones without having the view distorted by their own timezone..
Project Manager users also get a bit confused by timezones when working with tasks. This is based on the combination of the Project Timezone (from the Project Schedule) and the timezone of the PC. e.g. If a PM based in Australia is looking at a project based in the UK, then a task's 9am (UK time) start time shows as 6pm. If the PM forgets this and starts creating new tasks starting at 9am (Aust time) then when someone from the UK looks at it, their task is scheduled to start at midnight (the morning of the same day). I have suggested that it would be good to have an option in Workfront for the PMs to view and work with times as if they are in the local project timezone. The only current workaround is for the PM to manually calculate all times to the desired time before entering them in Workfront.....or change their PC timezone to the project timezone while editing that project, and then change it back before they work on a local project.
Lastly, there is a minor item related to kick-starts - times need to be converted to GMT/UTC before uploading. This is logical but just a gotcha if you aren't aware of it then upload your tasks and wonder why all the times changed.
I have submitted support incidents (then feature requests) for all the above items. I have also had a brief conversation with Workfront product management regarding the new Resource Scheduling features and their indication was that they are working on all of this in the new functionality and won't be fixing it in the older parts of the system.
If there are any updates on this that anyone is aware of I'm very keen to know as this is one of the biggest areas we want to see improvement.
Regards, David.
