Pull calculated planned hours into task report?

[LizSu]

Hi there, complicated question I've been working on with my Adobe team and my internal team.

Our organization (an advertising agency) is relatively new into our Workfront adoption and are still struggling with: a) estimating planned hours on projects accurately and b) keeping our Workfront projects up to date when project needs and planned hours change. To that end, we want to be able to review planned and actual hours for projects across a prescribed date range to help drive our project managers to enter and maintain accurate planned hours on their projects.

For instance...

Project X is live Jan 1 - June 30.

There are many tasks in Project X, varying from 1 day to multiple weeks each. Some of the tasks overlap.

We want to compare planned hours and actual hours March 1 - March 30.

Actual hours, of course, come directly from timesheet data and are easily pulled into reports.

The problem is that we can't clearly pull planned hours for a date range. We know that no matter the date range for a task, Workfront does algorithmically calculate planned hours by day (we see them in the Workload Balancer). However, we can't find a way to pull planned hours across a specific date range into reporting.

• Task report: The report will pull in all planned hours for any task that hits during the date range, rather than calculating how the hours should be allocated across each date. (So, this is accurate retroactively when a project is Complete but may grossly overestimate planned hours mid-project.)
• Project (Financial Data) report: We tried this angle as well. However, while there are several date filter options, none seem to be tied to hours.

Any suggestions here? Thank you so much!

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @LizSu,

You've found the right data, but it is more recent than the (now effectively "frozen", given other upcoming initiatives) native As Designed reporting options.

Given that, I invite you to consider:

• our Capacity Charts solution, which allows you to easily create insightful resource management reports with only basic Workfront setup, and/or
• our AFA Burn Report solution, which tracks Approved Forecast and Actual hours and margins at the Project, Department, Role, and User level over time

Both of these solutions allow you so specify a time span of interest, then Do The Math so you are comparing just that portion of the planned hours vs the actuals in that same time span. You can see an example of the latter in action using this link, and if you'd like to chat further, you're welcome to email me via doug.denhoed@atappstore.com.

Regards,

Doug 

[AleciaM1]

I'd recommend exploring the resource planner and workload balancer, if you haven't already. Likewise, please do submit a support ticket if these options aren't helpful, and we'd be happy to assist you.