Leap Session Q&A: Battle for Focus: How will Resource Management evolve in a modern enterprise

[Exp_-_VazgenBa]

Hi everyone,

For this year’s Leap, I had a session about how the role of hourly estimations is slowly decreasing as the work becomes more creative (if you haven’t had a chance to watch it - you can watch it here). If you have any questions about the content, I would be happy to reply! Since I’m located in Armenia, my answers will be delayed, but I’ll make sure to answer as soon as I get back online.

To kick things off, how relevant do you think tracking hours is to your planning processes and the nature of work your people are doing?

[skyehansen]

haha is that a loaded question? :) I often hear from our users how irrelevant tracking time is, given the unpredictable nature of the work they do, and yet these are the ground level tools that Workfront has provided for us, as well as the assumption that of course we want to do things this way -- so what other choice do we have if we want to indicate capacity or allocation?

I really liked your session by the way (and the bricklayer story)! Thank you for presenting.

[Vazgen_Babayan]

Thanks Skye!

I agree, historically Workfront was heavily focused on hour-based planning practices, but as the work evolves we also see ourselves needing to adapt to that reality. There are several approaches to the tracking effort we can take.

One popular one in Agile community is the system of points which is a more high level and has a larger margin of error but is also easier to set. Moving even more high level, there is T-shirt sizing - Large/Medium/Small which works fairly well for long-term planning practices. The highest level degree of estimations I've seen is purely counting tasks and calculating how many tasks can be done in a timeframe (and by tasks I don't mean Workfront object, just a unit of work). Ultimately, all boil down to analyzing historical trends and adjusting plans accordingly.

What we want to do is to take the minimal input from the users and instead leverage anonymized data from companies in the same industry, as well as historical data from the workers, to generate an estimate automatically. The first iteration of that is planned to launch with 20.4 and the first application will be Workload Balancer.