Personal Time-off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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