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Resource Scheduling - Your feedback to the Product team!

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Level 10
Hi everyone, Vazgen here, the Product Manager over the Resource Management suite in Workfront. As a part of the research we are currently conducting, I'm very interested in any feedback on potential improvements for Resource Scheduling area of the application. This includes Team Working On calendar, as well as the Scheduling tab under Project > Staffing. Please don't hesitate to criticise, praise or just discuss the functionality in this thread, that will helps us to better pinpoint potential usability and functional improvements for that area. Vazgen Babayan Product Manager, Workfront
7 Replies

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Level 10
There is only one thing I wish for right now — to be able to see the schedule for everyone in a role while in the staffing section of the project. For example, If I have to assign a writer for a project, I’d like to see all the writers’ schedules in Gantt or a grid, so I can choose one without having to leave the “assign staff” section of the project.

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Level 4
Hi Vazgen, This feedback may be a bit broader than you're looking for... When we're resourcing projects, I'd echo Jill's need to see all the resources that align with a Job Role (and even Skill, which the new functionality around Skill will be very helpful). At times, even if someone is more junior or senior, they might be a good fit based on their skill. Seeing summaries at a team level would also be helpful. For example, if we have 10 people on a team, seeing, quickly, the availability in hours of that team would be very helpful. Even summaries at the user level displaying the hours and / or number of tasks they have would help from a resourcing perspective; the current Working On screens are good, but many of our teams are used to seeing condensed spreadsheets - the extra expanding / collapsing of the tasks lists adds some clutter. Seeing the new Resource Planner in 18.2 Beta 1, there are good steps forward. I'd also add that having all the 'perquisites' to using the resource management (resource pools, resource managers, business case with budgeted hours vs planned) increases the on ramping and adoption of those tools. We also have client with annual SOW, defined by the hours (and then by the dollars per month). It'd be great to have that type of burndown at the Portfolio or Program level, working down from a total Program Budgeted hours instead of the cumulative project by project total budget. One client may have hundreds of projects per year that all chip away at monthly allocations of time. **And if anyone from an agency is reading this and has a solve (for any of the above), I'd be more than happy to collaborate and discuss virtually or at LEAP! Thanks, Vazgen. Jaimeson Jaimeson Wennerstrum Periscope, Inc.

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Level 8
Hi Vazgen, Thanks for reaching out to gather feedback. There are a couple areas of improvement that would be helpful for how our agency uses Workfront. Team Working On: The current Legacy Resource Planning Grid allows you to see total hours for the week and month if you condense the grid and/or filter to show only the month. The new Team Working On doesn't allow me to see total hours for the week or month, only for the day. We'd like the ability to see total hours by week and month as well. Another recommendation: The Team Working On page only pulls in users that with a license. We have users in our system without licenses which we use as placeholders for forecasting. Because of the way our business works, it's the best way we've been able to set up forecasting. Here's a link to the support ticket with additional info: https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/requests/1134635 Resource Planner: At the system level, have an option to automatically assign all planned hours as budget hours. It's too time consuming for our project managers to go through and "set projects' planned hours as budgeted" or "set users' planned hours as budgeted." Workfront needs to make our lives more efficient, and not having this option makes it less efficient for our team (actually, we're not using this feature at all because it's too time consuming). Scheduling > Resource Allocation Highlighting: I love that this is a feature, but I'm not sure how useful it is for our team since there's no easy way for resources to be able to see what hours of a task the project manager has designated for which day. It would be great for them to be able to have some sort of calendar or grid view of their schedule as an additional option to the My Work/New Home page. Please let me know if you have any questions.Thanks! Jennifer Tanabe Director, Project Management Vertical Measures

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Level 2
Hi Vazgen, The one major thing that prevents the staffing tool from being able to be adopted at my organization is that I can't filter out projects that do not have planned hours. We have an internal projects portfolio that we have many tasks in that people work on when they have downtime but this is not planned work. We need to be able to filter out these 20 tasks (approx.) so that we can just focus on the planned work. Can we get a filter to remove a certain portfolio from showing up under each resource? Otherwise there is just too much information there to have the tool be easy to use. Would love any feedback or questions you have if I am not being clear above. Thank you, Vicki

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Level 10
Lots of other good points raised already. In addition: We can't use the Scheduling tool yet, until a task-level custom data filter is provided. We need to be able to prevent the tool from showing certain unscheduled tasks which we will never actually resource. We need to be able to show only the ones we want to schedule. Please make the Scheduler match resources based on Role AND availability. The old Team Builder does/did this. Currently the Scheduler only matches based on Role. Please make availability data accessible via the API. i.e. I need to be able to find out how many hours someone was available between certain dates. Thanks David Cornwell

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Level 3
Would be really helpful on the project > staffing tool to be able to see daily totals for users, without having to see all of their other tasks - i.e. just the total number of hours at the top of the column. That way it is much easier to see when someone has availability - I don't necessarily need to know exactly what someone is working on at this level, I just need to know what resource they have available. Currently, when you turn on "show all user tasks" there is far too much information, and it becomes difficult to see where the tasks you have just assigned have ended up. I end up jumping back into the old user utilisation resource grid as that's a much cleaner way of looking at just that information. Ability to customise how tasks are coloured - e.g. by company, programme or portfolio - rather than just by project, to make it much easier to navigate. We have so many projects that the colour coding is pretty useless at the moment. An option to collapse rather than just minimise users - if someone has more than two or three tasks it can still take up quite a lot of room even when not expanded and means unnecessary clutter and scrolling. Option to make the unassigned area sticky, so it follows as you scroll down the page like the date bar does - hard to match up the unassigned tasks with people's availability if you keep having to scroll up and down. More filter options that also apply to the user timelines, not just the unassigned tasks. Need to be able to filter to just "current" projects, for example, to get a clear picture of user availability. Stephanie Mulrooney Tomorrow People

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Level 1
Hi Vazgen, Here is our feedback regarding the Project > Staffing > Scheduling and People > Scheduling areas. Ability to increase/decrease (contour) daily hours per person and have it auto-adjust the total Planned Hours. OR Ability to edit Planned Hours in the Task drop down. Currently our Project Owners have to toggle between the Tasks and Staffing pages which is very time consuming. Ability to edit Duration in the Task drop down. Contoured hours to shift if the Planned Start Date is changed. Currently, any contouring is negated if the dates change which happens all the time. Even redistribution is OK if the Duration changes though. Ability to filter by Teams even if you are not ON the Team. Example: Our Project Owners want to quickly review all Creative or Strategy users on their project without having to scroll through all the other roles or filter individually by roles/users. Totals based on date range selected. Example: Select (1) week 4/7 - 4/7 and have it show the total planned hours per user for this date range. Ability to set custom colors on Projects. Colors are often repeated because of our high number of projects. If the page is refreshed, the colors change which can be very confusing and difficult to track. Agree with Stephanie Mulrooney's feedback: Option to make the unassigned area sticky, so it follows as you scroll down the page like the date bar does - hard to match up the unassigned tasks with people's availability if you keep having to scroll up and down. We've been having a similar conversation on Resourcing improvements here: https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115003526574-Resource-Contouring-Shift-Hours-... Although it does not have to do with the Scheduling area specifically, we also wanted to note that contoured hours need to be reflected in the Resource Grid. Thank you! Megan Megan Mesick Wun Sea | Office