Hi Karen,
Resourcing (currently) is very difficult but Workfront is definitely working on this and by the end of the year there will be some great improvements.
So for my creatives... there are two main ways I use for our agencies depending on how reliable the PMs are with planned hours and how the Resource Manager or Department Lead wants to see it (I'm just going to say RM from now on).
If the planned hours are not reliable, or if the RM likes to see thinks in a colorful Gantt view, I recommend the Team option. They can see what is unassigned, what everyone is working on, and can easily drag and drop what they need to. There are some issue with this though:
1) you can only have one team on a task. So if you go the Team Copywriter and Team Art Director route, you have to make sure the PMs are splitting up those tasks so they can assign the two teams.
2) Unless you have the PMs put Team Copywriter and then the role Copywriter, you will not be able to do capacity planning. However, for most of the agencies that go this route, they do it because the planned hours are not reliable so they don't do capacity planning anyways.
The other option I tend to use is a dashboard with an unassigned report, a resource grid, and then a list of what everyone is working on by due date.
For the unassigned report, I use the Assignment object type that way I can put the roles I want in the filter and then say when Assigned To ID Is Blank. You can't do this on a task report because Assigned To is the Task Owner. Once that is assigned, Workfront considers the task assigned even if there are 12 other roles that don't have users. The RMs tend to like this report because it breaks out tasks to the different roles (i.e. If you have a task with a copywriter and an art director, it makes two line items). The only complaint about this report is it is not inline editable. They would need to click into the task to assign the users.
The resource grid is just a resource grid. Caution: Resource grids only show current projects. You will need another report (I use resource estimate object type) to see resource forecasts including planned or requested projects.
The third report is also an assignment report and shows all assignments for Creative (assigned or unassigned) grouped by Task Planned Completion Date so that they know what is due when.
Hope this helps.
