Resource planner. What is it good for...?

[StephanieMu]

Okay, can anyone explain to me what the resource planner is actually for? I just can't get my head around it and I'm wondering if I'm missing something...! I've finished the Ascent training and I understand how to use it, i.e. how it functionally works, but I don't understand why I would use it, or what it is actually achieving? What is the difference between planned hours and budgeted hours? Why would this be different? Why would you be budgeting more hours than you have planned in, and what's the end result of doing so? The prioritisation is basically useless unless you are using business case scorecards, right? It's just listed by start date and then in alphabetical order? We have over 300 live projects so there's no chance of manually re-ordering them. Can anyone give me an idea of how they are using it and what information they get from it? Yours confusedly... Stephanie Mulrooney Tomorrow People

[JaneBr]

Hello We currently use Workfront to manage both Business As Usual (BAU) and Project workload so are doing a trial this quarter using plans to lock down BAU commitment to show us true availability for Project work. This is where we are hoping that the Resource Planner will be able to help. When viewed by User, the Planned Hours (PLN) will show those planned hours in the BAU plan plus any project plans. The hours displayed in the DIF field will give us a high level indication of availability for project work. We are not currently using the Business Case to budget hours but will be reviewing how this can add value. I would envisage that we would use this to give us an indication how much time was originally budgeted and then it would be interesting to compare this against what is planned. I hope this helps and I will let you know how we get on with the trial. Best regards Jane Jane Bradshaw BAKKAVOR LTD

[AnthonyIm]

Hi Stephanie, We LOVE LOVE LOVE the resource grid and the resource estimate object types. Unfortunately, they are going away and the Resource Planner is supposed to be the answer to those two amazing reports. I will be honest, we do not use the By Project view and we don't use the budget hours since we have our client estimates/budgets in our financial tool. For the Role view and the User view, we use the Resource Planner to see, at a high level, the amount of work that will be happening in the next few weeks. This helps us re-prioritize work or know when we will need freelancers/resources from another business unit. Our Department Leads and Resource Managers like this information. (SIDE NOTE: Unfortunately for the By Role view, they added an item limit filter which makes it pretty much useless for us to see an overall picture of a group. If you have a bunch of job roles and people in a resource pool, you might run into this issue too. ) Anthony Imgrund FCB

[DavidCo3]

Hi Stephanie, We currently only use the planner to export the Available hours values for each of the resources so we can use this in our BI reporting outside of Workfront. One of the main reasons we don't use it more is because of the extremely limited filtering functionality. Fortunately they are adding a lot more filter functionality soon. Hopefully this will allow us to answer some more questions within Workfront without needing to go outside it to our BI tool. We would also use the Planner more if there were some more useful views/groupings and subtotals available to provide more useful information. One other issue is the lack of daily totals. It is not practical for users to have to switch between the Planner and the Scheduler to see this. Another thing we would like to see is to switch from % planned to % available remaining time so we can see who is most available. We don't use any of the budgeting functionality because we don't use business cases, and also because the function of budgeting hours seems to have no further impact on workflows down-stream (e.g. scheduling). If it could add some value into that workflow then we might consider going to the effort of budgeting. So, some room for improvement...and if there is some movement on this it would make it more compelling to use. Regards, David Cornwell

[MikePe]

We are stuck on the same point you made about the prioritization, trying to figure out how to work Business Cases into our workflow in order to harness the Portfolio Optimizer, and in turn, achieve some form of automatic prioritization for the Resource Planner. The issue we are currently having is that our process structure is built around sponsors submitting issues to Request Queues, because that is the most efficient setup from a license perspective (sponsors don't need plan licenses to submit requests), but for reasons I beyond my understanding, Business Cases cannot be submitted with those issues, only with projects, which would require a plan license for sponsors to create. Our plan eventually, if we can get Business cases into the mix, is to have our sponsors submit their Business Case-laden projects to the resource manager, who will then use the optimizer to prioritize projects by their score, and then use the Resource Planner to go down the freshly prioritized list and budget from top to bottom. If we have enough resources, everything will be ready to assign. If not, we'll have a clear view of the "redline" and the resource manager will be able to inform the business team of which jobs are not making the cut (in case they want to reprioritize). Sadly, this is all theory at the moment, because we still have that Business case hurdle to overcome. Mike Perez Tailored Brands