How to Exclude Placeholder Tasks from Workload Balancer Reporting?

[JessicaEa]

Hi WF Community,

How do you handle placeholder tasks to prevent them from inflating hours in the Workload Balancer?

A user on my team sets up projects with placeholder workflows that have future start dates. She later populates these with more detail when the work is ready to commence. The issue is that the initial placeholder hours are skewing our workload reports.

We can identify these tasks easily—they are all children of a parent task with "Spare" in its name. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to filter by a parent task name in the Workload Balancer.

Is there a recommended solution for this, aside from pushing the start dates years into the future?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Jessica.

[Lyndsy-Denk]

I bet there are bunch of creative ways around this. Off the top of my head: Assign the placeholder task to a job role specifically for placeholder tasks. Use the filters in Workload Balancer to exclude those tasks. You could probably use a Team with similar effect.