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Reporting on Roles -history and forecast

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Level 2
In our workflows we have assignments listed by roles- they get assigned to a person and the "role" disappears and the person's name is there. When I pull a report I can't get a report looking back on how many project/hours of this type of role did I need last week-month-quarter.... I have had to use who I assigned to but that is not completely accurate because I may have to use a designer to do some production work because they have open time but it was not design work. I need a way to have the role reflect the accurate work type and the assignment to reflect the accurate person in reporting. We only have one field in our work flows currently for this- but is the best way to solve - to add another field for the role and not delete it with a person's name when assigned? (sorta feel like I am answering my own question here- sorry) thoughts???? Julie Ohman Optum
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Level 10
not really sure what you're talking about. I do see in the task report that you're allowed to report on the job role name, and you're able to group by it so you much be able to summarize the data ... I guess if you assign to more than one person you would want to run an assignment report instead. Are you saying you're not able to do either? Which report are you running? -skye

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Level 2
I can't report looking back on the role because there is no longer a role- it has been replaced by a person's name. Julie Ohman Optum

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Level 10
The role is still there: if you edit the assignment by going to advanced assignments, you see the name of the assigned user and the role. So again I'm asking for a little more info: did you try to report and could not get the data to show, and if so, which report did you try? For example, I just ran a task report and all the assigned roles are being reported. title= >https://experience.workfront.com/s/article/Creating-Advanced-Assignments-2132424924 -skye

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Level 2
let me check this out- i think i have mine run on the assignment name- Julie Ohman Optum

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Level 10
I think she's saying she may have a task assigned to a role of Designer, but then assign it to a person who's role is Production Analyst (or something). And she's unable to tell what the previous role was. And it will be gone in this case (replaced by the role of the Assignee). One way to thwart that going forward Julie might be to leave the Role assigned even when you assign a person. Then you'll have both the previously assigned role and the person (and the role of the person). Of course this may create other headaches, but solves the one issue. So the question might be, why do you want the old role, if you assigned it to someone else? What do you need from that information? That might help get where you're looking to go.

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Level 10
Vic: I thought the thing to do was to assign that role to the user? Then you have this scenario: User job role = primary: Designer 100%, secondary Production 0% Task job role: Production When user gets assigned to task, in the advanced assignments of the task, shouldn't you see User Name and Secondary Job Role? Or am I misunderstanding? I guess I could go into Preview and test it out on myself... PS: after testing it out on myself (100% System admin, 0% Project manager) I find that if I assign myself to a task that has a project manager role, I come in as a project manager role. -skye

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Level 10
Hi Skye, I'd have to double check myself but I don't believe it'll work that way on the task itself. I believe it'll only allow/show one role for the assignee. Now if she's able to set up all the folks with multiple roles she'll be able to use the original role during the assignment. The downside will be if they want to use Capacity Planning. Having multiple roles would be difficult to deal with. If they don't care about Capacity Planning then maybe that's the road to take. But I think it would be easier to leave the original role assigned and assign the person as an addition. This still might cause Capacity Planning issues but IMO it's easier than setting up and keeping track of multiple roles for multiple people. Again it depends on why she needs that history. There might be an even better solution. Vic Alejandro, MPM, PMP, CSM | IT Program Manager Denver Water | t: 303-628-7262 | c: 303-319-6473 Http://www.denverwater.org Sent via mobile phone

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Level 10
hey Vic, yep: it only shows one role for the assignee but it's the role she wants tied to the task, so that's fine for her. If for example, she wanted the task to be assigned to a production analyst role and her user had production analyst as one of their secondary roles, it will tie the user to the task as a production analyst. And I'm not sure I understand the "capacity planning" comment. Are you talking Resource Planner? This is new to me, and I'm not sure I understand why it would be an issue there. If you set the user's secondary role to 0% -- they aren't giving any available hours to that role, as far as I understand. Is this a wrong assumption on my part? (I thought I tested that, but I tested so many resource plannery things over the course of a few days, that I can't keep it straight :disappointed_face: ) The only potential problem I see is if the secondary user isn't accounted for in a resource pool, would that become a problem when using the RP tool? And then I don't really know the solution, should I put them in a resource pool or make a point to avoid filtering by resource pool? -skye

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Level 10
Hi Skye, Yes, everything you said is correct. If you assign a person and use that secondary role during the assignment it'll just be difficult when viewing the Resource Planner by Projects (trying to see which projects are overloaded) the capacity variance will be off. And it could get confusing finding someone under two roles and figuring everything out. So yeah if you added both roles to the pool (or didn't filter on a pool) both roles would show up and the secondary role (at 0% allocation) would show no Availability as you stated, but the Planned Hours would show under that role/person. In the attached (again viewing by project) the Generic Reviewer is the User and IT App Developer is the secondary role for that User (at 0%). I assigned Generic User to a task for 40 Planned Hours and attached that secondary role. You'll see the AVL is 0, which is correct based on the User setup. But the PLN (Planned hours) is 40 because I assigned Generic Reviewer to a task. So my Variance is saying I'm at a deficit of 40 hours for this person (under this role). But their AVL is under a different role above (which will have their full availability). For the entire project this will balance and be fine. However, if the person is overallocated on the project and you're trying to find out where, you'll have to know they have two roles and look in two places to see which role is causing the issue. Multiply that by however many people you do this with and it can get tough. There's ways around it and ways to figure it out. Just raising the risk of confusion. I believe WF recommends trying to stick to one role per person if you're doing Resource/Capacity Planning. At least the two Leap sessions I've seen recommend that (and I agree). But if you don't do Resource/Capacity Planning, no worries :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes: .

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Level 2
In looking back at history- I am happy to just look at the roles used- not the people- as we have some contractors that come in and out through the year so i really need to know what kind of resources we used.... production, designer... It would be great if I could look back and see what kind of work each person was assigned as well. Julie Ohman Optum

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Level 10
thanks for setting up the visual and explaining so clearly, Vic! I really appreciate it and totally see where you are coming from. I'll play around with it some more and see how it can work for us. Although we would like to get into resource planner, we do have a few roadblocks in the way based on what you outline above. One roadblock is that there are objects in our system that are set up to be accessed based on role. Hindsight being 20/20, this was maybe shortsighted, because it leads to people changing roles and still needing access to the object, or people being given the role just to... have access to the object (I assume??). The other is, well... people sometimes have 2 roles. I do have a small team of a dozen people in the resource planner. They're playing happily, but they do have 3 people with dual roles who are intentionally set to things like 90% role 1 and 10% role 2. I haven't asked them how that looks in their planner tool yet. And I kind of wonder if perhaps that's the way to do it? Like if the generic user genuinely has 2 roles, they should be more truthful in their profile and give actual percentages to that second role? It's more work for a system admin to update this (and when?). -skye

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Level 3
Not to be the person that comes late to the party, but are we looking at the same data? From the task record perspective, the role does not go away. From the assignment record perspective, it is taking the role of the user. So, even though the view on a project landing page would change from role to name, it would not lose the primary role on the task object. In fact, if the person does not have that role, it will not update the assignment record with that user, instead it will add that user as an additional assignee (as an additional assignment record). Would a task report with actual hours and planned hours (done vs not done) suffice? A little text mode to get from roleID to role.name and I think this resolves the issue. Am I missing something? Apologies if I completely missed the boat on this. Dale Whitchurch Arthrex Inc

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Level 2
To date- we don't have "plans" in the system so we really can't forecast so I rely on what we did this year to make some assumptions on what we will likely do next year. So- knowing about how much design work was done- how much production work was done helps me understand what kind of resources I need for the year. Julie Ohman Optum