How do I account for a Workers time spent on meetings and calls?

[tonyj90775617]

When a designer or developer has meetings or calls that are not accounted for in WF those times are seen as gaps in resource management availability. Is there any tried and true solution/work-around for this? I was thinking of a project when they can self-assign tasks/hours for meetings/calls etc they are on. Another consideration was using the Outlook plugin to maybe sync meetings somehow. Anyway, any suggestions to make resource planning hours more accurate would be great.

[KathyNa]

What I ended up doing was creating one global corporate project. On it are 3 tasks: non-project activities (like meetings, calls, etc.), personal development (training, etc.), and research/discovery. Our project hours per day set under preferences is 6 (not 8). That means we have already accounted for the types of things that will be entered on this project. Because I do not want these project hours to be included in any resource management or capacity planning, I set up each task with 0 duration, 0 planned hours, and NO assignees. All users log hours to one of the 3 tasks. This way their supervisors can review for management purposes. Hours are logged, doesn't impact project planning...win/win. It took a little monitoring at first so users weren't logging things at the project level, but then it was smooth sailing. The only other habit to change was that their comments about what they did need to be entered "on" the time entry audit item, NOT on the task. Hope that helps.

[CraigSe1]

We set up a project "Administrative Activity Tracking" and populated it with tasks like "Training", "General Admin", "Vacation", etc. We did assign each task to each team member initially, but we have since removed the individual assignments in favor of roles that cover all associates. The reason for this was we started using the scheduling capabilities in Workfront and those ongoing tasks were appearing in the visual utility as items that each person was working on every hour of every day. By assigning to roles, no individual actually has the task assigned, but they can still log hours either on the task entry, or directly on their timesheet (which is how we do it). I do not believe any single associate has accepted the tasks however, which may be how we kept them from disappearing from everyone else.

[ColleenMa1]

Tony - this was helpful for me to review, being new to the forum (and maybe bringing it back to life!) so thank you for summarizing the initial problem in this discussion and possible solutions. Quick question - on C, what do you mean by 'those w/o meeting'? Trying to decipher what you mean and I need some clarification. I get the gist of C as a solution but need to understand what you mean by that. Colleen Masters Fathom