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Hours moving when a User switches to a new Team

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Level 6
We have an issue where a couple of users in Workfront have moved to another team and have taken their hours with them. For example: Fred worked for the Support team and logged hours on tasks he was given as part of Support, now Fred has moved to the Architecture team and the hours he previously logged on tasks for Support have moved with him and are being counted as Architecture hours. We have two problems to solve with this: 1. Tracing the hours that moved with Fred and re-allocate them to Support 2. For future Users who switch teams, how do we handle/prevent this issue? Our solutions so far: 1. Deactivate Fred and create him as a new user in Workfront when he switches teams 2. Create an hour type that will have team name in it so you can differentiate reporting per team on hours via the hour type 3. Tell Fred there's no hope for his future career and he will be stuck in the same job for the rest of his life....... Help! :)
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12 Replies

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Level 10
Hi: We deactivate the old ID and create a new one. We’ve found it is simplest way to keep it all straight. You could create an hour type, I think that would work too. When our people move, however, they frequently have a change in cost. Since WorkFront has no capability of understanding a change in rates, we have to create a new ID so that all previous work is not repriced at the new rate. Hope this helps! Eric

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Level 6
Ok, well I think that’s the way we’ll go, we don’t every have any changes in cost so deactivating and creating a new sounds like our best option. Thanks Eric. No we just have to figure out how to identify and re-allocate the hours that were moved incorrectly. Any thoughts on that? Laura Ray Project Support Analyst Bakkavor Information Systems Bakkavor Group West Marsh Road, Spalding, Lincolnshire, PE11 2BB, UK Direct: +44 (0)1775 763 010 www.Bakkavor.com // Laura.Ray@Bakkavor.com< [cid:image001.png@01D1E7FF.5BBB66E0]

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Level 2
Hi Eric, How do you get around using the same email address or does this not matter when the user is deactivated? We had issues upon launch when users had 2 activate accounts in differnet systems based on the same email. Thanks! Dawn

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Level 10
Hi: I’m not sure what the best way to move the hours might be. We happen to use the brute-force approach, we in the PMO open timesheets and move hours. It’s a pain because we have to unapproved the hours from the project, then we can move them around projects, then we have to approve the timesheets and then approve the hours on the project. In the end, our data is more accurate. Brute-force works for us. Thanks! Eric

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Level 10
‚ò∫ I have a not so clever answer to this. If the email address is daffy.duck@crowley.com< , I change the email address in the old ID to daffy.duck_NO@crowley.com< . I also change the SSO ID from DUCKDA to DUCKDA_NO. That prevents anyone from logging in as the old ID. Inelegant, but hey, it works. Eric

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Level 6
Lol! I will start giving the old ones Disney names from now on, I like that, HA! Re: Brut force, I had to do that for some other reason last week and yes what a pain to unapprove, move hours then reapprove! I think if I could initially show the hours in a report it would help but I haven't successfully created that yet!. Started with an hour report, filtered to show only Fred's hours etc etc but we're thinking we could just add a couple of filters on the teams' existing reports showing actual hours per week/month per team member but again, not sure exactly how. Fun times ahead!

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Level 2
I will always go with what works - elegance is only icing on the cake :) Thank you

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Level 2
Laura - How long has Fred been in the new Team? I would consider moving him back to his old team and then deactivate him and move his new hours to the 'new' user Fred. Regards, Dawn

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Level 10
Eric, your note reminded me: there is a trick that does allow Workfront to lock in rates as they change over time without having to create new user: create a Billing Record. Not only that: once a Project has a Billing Record, it cannot be (accidentally) deleted; I've seen a few Huge Queues have that happen over the years. Bye bye original requests...ouch! You can certainly create such Billing Records manually in Workfront, but these benefits are so powerful that we added an "Auto Bill" option as a schedulable job in our UberCalc AtApp. Regards, Doug

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Level 10
Laura, rather than reenter all those hours manually, you could instead use our Excel Updater AtApp, which supports Hours (or even the native Kickstart, come to think if it). Filter for Hours, download to Excel, edit to new owner, upload to new owner, bulk delete from old owner: Voilà. Regards, Doug

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Level 10
Hi: Yes, we looked at billing records. How it works is it associates a cost with the hour record. Once the hours are approved on the timesheet, the hour record is also locked. If you change the billing rate for someone later, it doesn’t go back and change that old locked hour record. The problem we faced was that WorkFront is architected to have two different dollar figures associated with labor - Cost and Revenue. What we would be doing is using the Revenue functionality to manage cost. The rub arises when you look at WorkFront screens. They don’t know that we are using billing for cost and it can be confusing. You also have to have a dollar figure associated with the resource at the time the hour record is locked for a revenue figure to be locked as well. We didn’t. That means that projects in flight would not have an accurate cost. Sure, we could set up the billing record and move forward, but it didn’t solve our cost problem for projects in flight. It might work fine for other WorkFront customers. We didn’t think it worked well enough for us. Good thinking, regardless! Eric

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Level 6
Thanks Doug, I'll take a look at that.