Resource Planner: Setting Roles and Users Planned Hours as Budgeted

[JennTa]

Hi, I'm curious to know if anybody else is finding it inefficient that the Role and Users Planned Hours aren't set as Budgeted automatically at a system level (or at least have the option to do so). Our organization has lots of monthly projects, so it's tedious for a Resource Manager/Project Manager to go through each project and manually set this each time they set up a project. I submitted this to the idea exchange in October, but it hasn't gained any traction. Here's the link in case you'd like to vote/check it out: https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002689894-Planning-Tool-Option-to-set-all-... Also, another question came to mind. Is there one person in your organization that's responsible for looking at resource capacity and resource forecasting? If so, how are they going about doing this with the new tools? I'm finding it hard to be able to see a high level picture of each team's capacity/availability using the new tools. I rely on the Legacy Resource Planning tool to do this currently. Thanks in advance for your help! Jenn Jennifer Tanabe Director, Project Management Vertical Measures

[BarryBu2]

The problem I can see with automatically setting a projects budgeted hours to planned is do you have a process for PM's extending hours? If I'm working on a project that's approved, and I decide over night to double the effort estimate does it just get automatically approved and set as a new budget? Perhaps it could work like baselines - when you first take a project out of planning, the budget hours are set to planned, but it's a manual process after that. The problem is, I'd also like to see a 'request different hours' from the PM side that the resource manager can reject or approve. Certainly that would need to be optional. Barry Buchanan Work Management Australia

[JennTa]

Hi Barry, Yes, I can understand the concern which is why I'd recommend it's an optional setting. I think this use case varies based on your organization. What you suggest is how I wish the tool worked.. The baseline is set "automatically" (or each organization has the option to turn that feature on) and then if budgeted hours changes after that it's a manual process to make the cange. That would make much more sense for our organization. The problem we're having is that every month our team is setting up between 30-60ish projects, and that manual effort is a LOT on our resource/project managers.. it's creating an inefficiency. Appreciate you adding your input! Jenn Jennifer Tanabe Director, Project Management Vertical Measures

[DavidCo3]

We haven't started using the new resource planner yet, other than a bit of exploring. There are a few fixes/improvements coming that we need in place before we can use it (hopefully no later than 18.2). I think we would be in the same boat as you, Jenn regarding the setting of budgeted hours. We would probably need to be able to have them set to planned at the start of the project, then adjusted manually as appropriate. A missing link for me is the workflow of how hours budgeted in the planner affect the scheduling process in the Scheduling tool. I believe work is being done on this also. David Cornwell

[melindal3825541]

As planned hours are at the task level and budgeted hours are for the whole project, how do you know which tasks get which hours? Are you using templates which have task hours planned and adjusting? Just trying to picture how an automation would work! Thanks -- Melinda Layten, Senior Consultant Work Management Improvement CapabilitySource Phone: (484) 505-6855 site: www.capabilitysource.com email: melinda.layten@capabilitysource.com Helpful? Buy me a coffee: https://www.patreon.com/mlayten - we simplify your work so you can run your business -

[DavidCo3]

Hi Melinda, I was figuring that as the planner tool knows the number of planned hours per resource/role and lets you budget at that level then it would probably be storing the budget values at the task level. My thought was that this could potentially be built into the scheduling tool to allow those users to know "OK, these tasks have had their budgets approved so I can go ahead and schedule resources on them". I can see how that's different to the way the system works now, but I don't think our organisation will see the value in the overhead of entering and maintaining the budgeted hours if it doesn't help us control the allocation of resources to the tasks. Regards, David Cornwell

[JennTa]

David, I agree with your last statement " I can see how that's different to the way the system works now, but I don't think our organisation will see the value in the overhead of entering and maintaining the budgeted hours if it doesn't help us control the allocation of resources to the tasks." We're in the same boat. Do you already have something submitted to the idea exchange? Jennifer Tanabe Director, Project Management Vertical Measures

[Kelly_Wehrmann]

@Jenn Tanabe , I'm interested in following this. We are starting to look at the new planning and scheduling tools to see how they can be leveraged. Do you have any projects or activities that you setup annually? We have a few annual projects that are setup with basically "bucket tasks" that span the year for team members to report time for weekly change control meetings and service request review meetings . We found it to be more helpful for reporting to use projects for this type of work, over using General Hours. When we attempted to use General Hours there was not a good way to "classify" the hours for reporting, based on the needs of our organization since custom forms don't exist for General Hours. We want to be able to refine our process (bucket tasks) so that we can budget hours for these projects and have more meaningful planned hours for the resources (basically, designate 1 hour/week on a single day) so that the scheduler is more reflective of their availability to take on new work. So far I have attempted to use the scheduling tab to update a single task to distribute the hours for a single resource for an entire year. It was extremely cumbersome and I couldn't imagine doing this for a minimum of 45 resources, even worse, doing it for an entire year. I think I stopped after 2 months. Then I tried using a Recurring Task generated weekly. This was easier to setup but on the scheduler it creates little tiny blocks that visually, you can tell what they are at first glance and then I noticed that it includes them on a line with other tasks. I'm guessing to optimize space? But it seems confusing to me that one of the recurring tasks get pushed down a line (away for the others) to include a different task (see screen shot below). Does anyone know why it does this or if it can be controlled? Also, what do you do to include these "bucket tasks" in your schedule? Looking for viable alternatives! Thanks! Admin Kelly-Wehrmann SSFCU

[JennTa]

Hi Kelly - We don't set up tasks on an annual basis, although we had thought about doing that for certain individuals/roles. Sorry, I'm of no help there. What you describe as being cumbersome is exactly what I'm running into as well. Since we set up projects on a monthly basis, that's 50+ projects (with various tasks) that we have to manually update to set planned as budget hours. It's inefficient for us, which is why we haven't started using the Resource Planner tool yet. Jennifer Tanabe Director, Project Management Vertical Measures

[DavidCo3]

Hi Kelly, I think the short recurring tasks will be a lot neater and easier to manage than having single tasks stretching over a year. Obviously this creates a bit more overhead of the users in terms of accepting and completing them, but it may help align their actual work with the plan in Workfront. In terms of the task alignment on screen, I presume that the logic doesn't consider that there is a relationship between the recurring tasks and so it doesn't always put them on the same line. Perhaps that's possible as an enhancement though. In general, one of my criticisms of earlier versions of the tool was that tasks were not neatly arranged and tended to go on a separate line each, creating a lot of blank space and waste of vertical real-estate - so, I certainly wouldn't like to see them go back to displaying them like that. Regards, David. David Cornwell

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Kelly, In our "http://store.atappstore.com/product/ubergantt/">UberGantt solution, we included logic that collapses Tasks to a single horizontal row in order to save vertical space, unless the Tasks would overlap, in which case we "break out" the second Task (typically sorted by Planned Start Date) onto its own row, to ensure it is readable. So, following that concept, I suspect you are correct that the new planning and scheduling tools work similarly. In your screenshot, the 6th reoccurring Task you created starts later than the Contractor task in that same week, and therefor gets bumped down to the next available whitespace row. If so, short of moving your reoccurring date to ensure it is always the "earliest" Task in any given week, I doubt you can re-sort it any other way without a design change. That said, on the viable alternatives front... I actually just got back last night from the Workfront Sales Kickoff in Las Vegas, where we shared our new soon-to-be-public solution called Resource Contouring that does make it easy to take a single long-running task (e.g. "Weekly Meeting" with 52 hours on it assigned to Doug) and then quickly contour it at a Monthly, Weekly, or Daily level. Under the hood, it stores the data back into Workfront at the daily contoured level just as Workfront does: it's just designed to make this high level planning easier. I've attached the screenshot from the Sales Kickoff I to illustrate how it works. NOTE: the contouring part on the right is editable , for those with sufficient rights to do so within Workfront (e.g. the Project Manager, Resource Planner, etc.) There are many usecases for our Resource Contouring solution, mostly around simplifying high level, long range planning. I hadn't thought about also using it for reoccurring meetings until I saw your post, but do think could also be another good application of the technology since – getting back to the "bump" concept – by being part of a single task, the alignment would then stick to a single row in UberGantt (and possibly even within Workfront's new planning and scheduling tools). If you'd like to explore this further with me, you're welcome to ask questions here, or email me directly via doug.denhoed@atappstore.com Regards, Doug