Understanding user allocation for "ghost time" such as meetings, trainings, service days, etc.

[mmcgovern]

My organization is struggling to get a full picture of user allocation in Workfront. We currently use the tool to understand allocation for marketing campaign work and PTO, but are unable to capture other "ghost time" areas such as trainings, meetings, or service projects. Any suggestions on how to account for that allocation against a user's FTE is welcome!! Mike McGovern Deloitte

[NRYNR]

Hi Mike, how about creating and "Administrative/Overhead" project with tasks that people can all align their planned hours in? I've seen this work very well in the past.

[DagmaraGa]

Hi Mike, We've got BAU project created per each team per year. And within those we've got general hours tasks created for each of user. Along with it, we have estimates how much time they would be spending on BAU task and put there Planned Hours. We're also use those BAU project to capture our general hour time. Dagmara Garwell BAKKAVOR LTD

[mmcgovern]

Thanks all! Mike McGovern Deloitte

[TamiJo]

We've toyed with the idea of setting hours/day at 6 instead of 8 in order to account for this. Anyone tried that? Tami Johnson SAIF Corporation 503.373.8702

[JamesBe1]

Tami, we've tried that at our Organization and it's given us just a little bit of trouble. When PMs are setting up tasks and the give them a Duration of say "8 Days" or "2 Weeks" Workfront will by default convert the text based on an 8 hour 5 day a week timeline. The net result is that if a PM creates a task and says it will take "3 Days" then it will the Planned Completion date will actually be 4 calendar days from the Planned Start Date (8h * 3d = 6h * 4d). This created a lot of confusion for our PMs, so we elected to set it back to 8 hour days. If your PMs can understand that caveat, then setting the schedule to 6 hours is a fantastic solution. *UPDATE* You can actually control the default on what "Days" and "Weeks" is interpreted to in Workfront through project preferences. James Bender Jackson/JTS

[VicAl]

I've done that at other places of employment. 6.67 hours to be exact �� . But we used it to account for email time, walk-ins, bathroom, water cooler, coffee, etc. For meetings etc., we create a task to log time and account for resource planning. For Training, if it's related to the project we definitely create its own task to account for the time etc. If it's unrelated to the project we just have the person block that time off in their calendar so it moves their tasks around that time slot.