Personal Time-off

[glenncat]

Does anyone know if there's a way to get alerts if someone puts in personal time-off? We're running into issues where we schedule a project, the tasks have predecessors and are set to 'as soon as possible', then if someone goes in after the project has been built and puts in PTO and it coincindes with their tasks, it automatically shifts all dates after that. Moving things past the launch date. No one is notified and they do not get an alert that it's going to cause timelines to shift.

[EricLu2]

Hi: Because of the way WorkFront models PTO, it is difficult to navigate that information nicely in the WorkFront reporting engine. To work the issue you have below, I snap a baseline and then as time goes on - and the dates on tasks mysteriously shift around - I compare the baseline to the current plan to find out which tasks have shifted. Then, I look for the usual suspects, of which PTO is a primary cause of dates shifting automatically. I use the baseline comparison to know where to look, then I look at the resources assigned to the task and look for new PTO. AtApp might be able to navigate the PTO and do some nifty things to alert you when PTO is entered. Chris/Doug? Can you help? Thanks, Eric

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Thanks for thinking of us, Eric. Yes, we could probably create a Magic Report or possibly an UberCalc for this, but first, I'd suggest trying to create an out if the box report on new PTO entries this week, and or (gasp) abandoning the PTO concept in favor of a standard project for PTO pirposes, which I find to be more transparent and useful, in practice. Regards, Doug

[DavidCo3]

Hi Doug, So if you use a project for PTO and book people on time-off tasks at 100% then this obviously takes care of reporting on their availability (for other work) on a given day during that period, and it would also prevent tasks from moving around if new time-off bookings are added. However, I assume that this would also mean that the "User Utilization" report would show their available hours as full for the month? If you use a PTO project, is there any way in the system you can still get a figure for their real available hours for the month? Or do you just export and work it out in Excel or one of your other tools? Regards, David

[EricLu2]

Hi: You’ve got your finger right on the problem, David… If we add someone to the PTO Project, the other projects will show the person still working in that timeframe. You are correct, the User Utilization report will show the person being overallocated for that week of holiday. Because a PTO Project doesn’t adjust the regular project availability, because a PTO Project simply overallocates someone, we chose not to take that approach. We encourage people to declare their PTO in WorkFront, because it manages the calculation of availability okay. What we lack, however, is any reasonable way to report on that PTO. In terms of living with evil, we have chosen to live with the poor reporting evil as opposed to the incorrect allocation of labor evil. Eric

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi David, Correct: for trasparency and reportability, I am proposing you NOT use PTO within Workfront, and instead use a standard project to record PTO. For best results, I also invite you to consider: - creating one such project per year (eg 2016 PTO) for everyone, ideally; or per month/business unit if you have too many people - establish procedures to have people book time as tasks on the PTO project: one task, one assignee, per PTO event (e.g. if Doug, David, Eric and Nate are golfing this Friday afternoon, that is 4 separate Tasks; and if Doug is also vacationing in Europe all of August, that is one other separate Task) - convert your current data to this PTO format - drop your PTO events (and create a PTO Exception report to highlight any that sneak back in the "old" way), to avoid double-counting and showing people as iver allocated - create a common dashboard called PTO; or "vacations", "kitchen calendar", etc. -- whatever best suits what your company calls it, for all to see within Workfront - on that dashboard, show the current year's PTO project(s) in calendar format - show people how they can easily toggle people on and off to visualize (just) what they need, or even make their own calendars (e.g. My Golf Games, My Vacation in Europe) - Bonus 1: because these are Tasks, you can add custom data, and show that custom data on the calendar - Bonus 2: this approach can be extended into a sophisticated Vacation Request solution(e.g. raise an issue to request a vacation, tie it to an approval path, then convert it to a task, etc.) - Bonus 3: AtAppStore has a just released a draggable calendar for Workfront...in case my golf game gets a rain delay Regards, Doug

[DavidCo3]

Hi Doug, Thanks for taking the time to provide your detailed advice. That's one of the things that makes the community so valuable to me....getting real world feedback from users and experienced third party implementers/integrators such as yourself. I will trial this with a department or two and see how it works for us. Cheers, David

[glenncat]

Thanks for the suggestion Eric. Curious do you have any background on how they model PTO and why they model it that way?

[glenncat]

I agree on the transparency, Doug. We put in a request with our tech person to add it to the dev list - a notification when someone adds time to the time-off calendar.

[glenncat]

Doug, thanks for the in-depth pointers. I think you've spoken with others on our team before. :) That's exactly the way we were/are managing PTO, with a yearly project.

We were humming along nicely until we noticed that dates were shifting. It caused a bit of head scratching wondering who was making the items move. After some testing we discovered that when task constraints are set to ASAP and someong puts time off in, it shifted the dates. Not that same day, but by the next morning it skewed everything that came after it (we use predecessors).

We're testing out what works best for now to manage it so items don't slip by us. Reporting, changing restriaints to Must Finish On and/or Fixed Dates.

[EricLu2]

Hi: I don’t know why they model PTO that way, but it is a list object, which is a construct used throughout WorkFront. It is my opinion that they have not modeled it inconsistently, rather, they have not simplified the use of that list object in reporting as they have simplified other lists. I think they COULD create another reporting object called PTO and then create a view behind it that ties it to the user declaring the PTO. That is what they do for other objects of this construct, they just haven’t done it (yet) for the PTO object. The issue isn’t how they built it, its that they haven’t simplified the use of that object in reporting as yet. There are other objects that they do not expose through the reporting system. Because the Text Mode process is based on tribal knowledge, and no documentation, it makes it exceedingly difficult for people like me of average intelligence to use Text Mode to access stuff. We are dependent on the boffins at WorkFront to make it simple, as they have done for many objects, just not the PTO object (yet). Thanks for asking! Eric

[AnthonyIm]

Hi, So we are actually just transitioning over from using Workfront's Time Off to using a request queue for PTO. Like you, we noticed that if a task is assigned to one person and that person has taken time off, the planned completion date for the task moves AND it moves without telling the Project Owner. Now if you have more than one person on the task, there is actually a setting where you can say for multiple people to take the project's schedule not the individuals. That will stop the problem for multiple people. But you still have a problem when one person is assigned a task. We also ran into the issue where resource managers/department leads wanted to see PTO in the resource grid. With Time Off, the person's hours turn red earlier, but my RMs and Department Leads aren't fans of this approach. So we took the approach of a request queue. There is are two queue topics: PTO and OOTO. For both, the employee put in the reason for the time off (Subject), Planned hours (so the time is take up on an resource grids), Planned Start and Planned Completion. We also used the Primary Contact field for cases where an assistant or someone else was putting in time for another employee. For OOTO, the request is just created. For PTO, we have an approval process that goes to the Supervisor of the Primary Contact to approve. There is one thing that we haven't figured out, so if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears. We need the issue to be assigned to the Primary Contact. It doesn't appear on the resource grid until the issue is assigned to the person. But we don't know how to set up routing rules that go to the Primary Contact. You can only do it to a specific person or team. Another thing with this approach is that you can't use a calendar. Unfortunately Actual Dates always trump Planned Completion currently on calendars. This is an issue when someone closes the issue early or late. The dates adjust on the calendar and don't reflect the time actually taken. So we are stuck with list views but this hasn't been a big concern for people.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

My pleasure, David; thank you for saying so. Cathleen, excellent point: to avoid having dates inadvertently slip, Must Start On, Must Finish On, or Fixed Dates lock them in. We use the latter on our draggable calendar, since that way, users can easily shrink or stretch the task. Regards, Doug

[lpattonvb]

I found this string while I was trying to do some research on Time off best practices. This string has not been active in almost a year. I am curious if anyone on this string ever came up with a solution to address schedules shifting when someone adds time off to Workfront? My project managers stumbled on this issue a few weeks ago... I am trying to drive the behavior of our employees to enter time off into Workfront so we can use the "Team" area to have visibility to when folks are on vacation. Now my project managers are concerned that project schedules are going to shift without their knowledge.

[EricLu2]

Hi: It is currently difficult to make use of the Time Off data within WorkFront. There are no automated triggers to alert anyone when things change. The data within WorkFront is not easy to get to. It is my opinion that you’ll have to use Text Mode to make the data most usable. Search the community for more information about how to access Time Off using Text Mode. I’m looking forward to when WorkFront makes the data more accessible. Sorry that is no help, but I’m afraid there is little that can be done. I’m hoping someone jumps in and contradicts me with cool facts I don’t know (yet). Thanks! Eric

[lpattonvb]

I found a way to provide PTO visibility to managers. I am more concerned with notifying a project manager when time off is impacting a Project schedule. Lisa Lisa Schliker Business Systems and Process Lead Certified LSS BB BOSE Product and Communication Design Creative Services Office: +1 508 215 0304 Mobile: +1 978 771 6111

[EricLu2]

Yes, I share your concern. Here is where surprises happen. A PM will say I have a task that should start on work day 1, has a duration of ten work days, and finishes on work day fifteen. The PM can’t figure out why there are five extra days in the task. Eventually the PM will discover that someone assigned to the task has Time Off declared in the middle of the task, so WorkFront silently and clandestinely adds the amount of the Time Off to the duration. No flags, nothing that tells you WorkFront added that time in. I figure someone could write a report that adds the duration to the planned start date and then calculated the DATEDIFF between that calculated end date and the WorkFront calculated Planned Completion Date. If there is a difference, it is probably due to someone having Time Off within the duration of that task. Thanks! Eric

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Lisa, In addition to my esteemed colleague Eric's advice, here's a snipped of an email I sent to a client late last week related to this same "PTO visibility" topic: I’ve been giving this some more thought. My assumption in my last email was that you wanted to load upcoming time off into each user’s Personal Calendar. Upon reflection, though, I would not recommend you use the PTO feature within Workfront. Although convenient and easy, it is relatively hidden from a capacity planning perspective, and cannot be authorized for approval. For those reasons, the best practice is instead to create a special Project (or Projects) with Tasks representing the Time Off Requests, which then are visible and considered in capacity planning, and can be authorized for approval. And in that case, if your Accounting System “knows” those (possibly approved) upcoming time off events, yes: our Excel Updater could easily load that information into Workfront, provided we create some sensible conventions for the Project(s) and Task names. That said, perhaps you were wanting to load actual time off that has occurred, as hours. If so, same solution - Excel Updater - but in that case, loading Actual Hours (with special Hour Types, such as “Personal Time Off”) under - I’d suggest - similarly sensible Project(s) and Task names. Huh: you could do both, too, come to think of it. Let’s add this to our agenda for our next meeting. Regards, Doug

[DavidCo3]

Hi Eric - We are also having issues where a resource submits a new PTO entry and it moves a scheduled task which they are assigned to, and nobody knows.....it is not even in the Journal records that the due date changed!. I arrived at this thread today and I also would like a report/view which does this. I realise that baselines are an option, but from my understanding it should be possible to use calculated columns, but I don't know how to put it together. As an alternative, I could extract the task Start and End dates, and the Duration and then work it out in Excel, but I hope someone here could help do it in Workfront. Cheers

[EricLu2]

Hi: Yeah, it’s a pain. The problem I saw with using calculated dates is that, well, it recalculates. I’m not sure how to have a formula that calculates once and only once. IF YOU COULD, you could have a date called “Planned Completion Saved”. It equates to the Planned Completion Date until you force a recalc. You could run a report that shows all tasks when the Planned completion date isn’t equal to the saved planned completion date. Actually, that’s really how baselines work. We simply compare the baseline to current forecast to see those tasks whose planned completion date has moved out. I would really like an indicator or something that says this planned completion date includes the impact of one or more assigned resource’s PTO. Best wishes for working out something! Eric

[DavidCo3]

I really like that suggestion Eric. It would be nice if there could be some indicator or formatting on a field to show that it is being impacted by a user or schedule. Perhaps something for Workfront product management to have a think about :) I will look through the feature requests and add one if needed.