How do you notify your resource managers about work that needs to be assigned?

[SamanthaIsin]

We're implementing the Workload Balancer! And are super stoked about it, but I can't find any way to send reminders to our resource managers to go in and make assignments. How do you all navigate this?

[AnthonyIm · Accepted solution]

Well for us, our Resource Managers live in Workfront so they see when things change all the time as they are already there.

How do you do unassigned work? Just a job role, a team assignment, or a fake/placeholder person?

For a team assignment, you could put them on the team so that they get those notifications as well as the rest of the team. And if you do just job role or fake/placeholder person, you could a report that just shows those items. You can even do scheduled emails to let them know if there is anything they have outstanding. (i.e. send them an assignment report at noon with any task where role ID is not blank but assigned to ID is blank.)

[SamanthaIsin]

@Anthony Imgrund‚

You're brilliant! We use a combo of team assignments and job roles to get tasks into the workload balancer to our resource managers to be assigned. My problem was that we left our projects in planning and the notifications weren't coming through. We've adjusted the process so the projects are current and the resource managers are notified through the team requests notifications.

However, I have one more dilemma. My resource managers are the project owners - I need the designer on the project to be the project owner.

The best way I can think to do this is create a report with all the projects that are assigned, but where the owner is still a resource manager. In that report I need to display who is assigned to the design task - how would I do that? @Kyna Baker - inactive‚ and @Doug Den Hoed‚ I've looked all over the community to try and figure out how to reference task details on a project report. Have you ever seen anything that would indicate this is possible? Or do you know if it is?

[kynabaker16]

Hey Samantha,

I'll keep looking, but I saw this question from a few days ago about bringing the task status into a project report...I know it's not the task assignment, but maybe it can get you started thinking about how to bring something from the task level onto the project level?

Kyna

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Samantha,

If your goal is to have a report return only those Projects whose Project Owner does not match the (Primary) Assigned To ID of a Task called "Design" (for example; or where such a Task is missing), I invite you to give this Project report textmode filter a whirl:

EXISTS:a:$$EXISTSMOD=NOTEXISTS

EXISTS:a:$$OBJCODE=TASK

EXISTS:a:projectID=FIELD:ID

EXISTS:a:name=Design

EXISTS:a:assignedToID=FIELD:ownerID

@NRYN R - inactive‚ , now that I've noodled out the syntax, I think this would make a nice addition to your Text Mode in Filters Using EXISTS resource (which as usual, is where I started...)

Regards,

Doug

[SamanthaIsin]

That worked! Thank you!

[NRYNR]

Great suggestion Doug! I've added this to the WFPro Text Mode Examples.