How do you track non-project related time to roll up into Workload balancer such as weekly meetings?

[JanineDi]

For instance, some of our team has about 5 hours of regular meetings each week. So if they work 40 hours per week, they really only have 35 hours available. To accurately use Workload Balancer, I remember my consult during onboarding mentioned creating a project called Overhead and putting that stuff in there. I'm ok with that, but I'm not sure how to set that up for a re-occuring. I.e. I feel like I would have to make 52 tasks (1 for each week of the year). And then I don't want each of those team members to have to go in and mark each meeting complete and have it clutter their task list.

How do other manage this issue?

[TammyWe]

Hi Janine,

We have set our allocations for individual contributors to 80% (32 hours/week) which is about 6.5 hours per day. Hours over 6.5 show up as red (overallocated) in the Workload Balancer. We do have a lot of meetings so we are testing this to see how it goes. It's possible we might have to lower it to 6.0 if warranted. Some of our managers who also are contributors have allocations set to 50% (4 hours per day).

Tammy Weaver-Stoike

[RandyRoberts]

Sure would be nice if the Outlook plugin allocated time according to Outlook meetings. Right now it just displays meetings in your home page calendar but does not block your available time.

[AlisonW]

Hi Janine,

Sorry I am late to the party here! We have "Admin" Projects for each major organizational unit. They have a single task per user that have start/end dates covering the entire year (we decided on calendar, could have easily used fiscal). We then assign planned admin hours to that task for each person. Teams generally have a standard of what they expect for admin time for their members. These tasks then show up on the timesheet and time can be logged. This also gives you the option to measure planned vs actual admin time spent at the end of the year.

It does take a bit of maintenance though, at the end of each year, old tasks need to be closed and new ones created. I have started adding the year onto the task name (eg Alison Wells - 2021) so that as I am creating tasks ahead of time, users aren't confused about which one to log time against. Copy to/bulk edit are great helps here. We keep adding tasks to the same project, old tasks are moved under a "Previous Years" parent.

Note: In our case, not all meetings are Admin time. But things like staff meetings, general review meetings, etc definitely would be.

We are also considering doing this for PTO and abandoning the Workfront Time Off calendar. Obviously PTO would work a bit differently in that people would need to create tasks for the themselves, but generally the same concept, and much more visible and easily reported on.

Hope this helps!

[laurence_jayawardane]

Alison, I am glad to be reading your response. I'd set up admin projects for our staff to log time against, so it's good to see others are doing the same thing. Otherwise we end up with overallocated staff very quickly...

[JaneBr]

Hi we have BAU plans for each team, in which there are BAU tasks as well as one task that lasts for the duration of a year with planned hours based on their BAU vs Project %. This is reviewed in the Resource Planner each quarter against the actual time logged to see whether it needs to be adjusted. We don't like to spend too much time on this but there are sometimes obvious changes that need to occur, e.g. when someone becomes more dedicated to project work we reduce their BAU allocation. We've been using this since Oct 2018 and it works really well by giving everyone visibility of availability for project work. I'd be happy to discuss further 😊

[KendraRo]

We also have a general project with tasks for this same issue. You can set a Parent Task that repeats weekly or monthly. Create a new task, it will be the parent task when you set to recurring, set it as recurring and select your start/end date, etc.

You can also set-it to complete automatically under the tracking mode so you do not have to manually close them weekly or monthly.