Hi Heather, For our pharma agencies, the resource mgmt part is one of the more harder parts. The first issue is the ever changing nature of a pharma project.Because of this, putting planned hours for the various assignees on tasks is difficult for the PMs. We've tried to do smaller modular templates and brand specific templates to help with the varying MLR/Submission processes as well as different check-ins/reviews. And these have helped a little. We have also talked to Workfront Product about ways to make assigning hours easier. The second issue is that a lot of groups are shared resources in our pharma agencies since brands don't normally bought out resources like they do in our consumer agencies. This means we have a lot of department leads who end up acting like resource managers to make sure there are resources available for the demand. For the smaller agencies, team functionality works well as everyone on that team gets notified and someone picks it up. The team members can also use the Team Requests or even the working on calendar to see what is unassigned and can move things to people with availability. Unfortunately the unassigned areas for Scheduling Tool and Working On do not show planned hours. So for the larger agencies, we have actually created fake people (Health Developer Person, Area 23 QA Person, Neon Copywriter Person, etc.) that we assign the tasks too. Our people love the flashed based resource grid and by assigning things to the fake person, they can easily see how hours for that role span across a project and how is free to work on them. They can then go into that project and use the swap tool to assign a real person to the fake person's tasks on that project. Again, these solutions have kind of worked, but I'll admit we haven't come anywhere close to perfection, but we are slowly getting there. Are there any particular issues you are struggling with that I haven't mentioned? Maybe it is something we have tried before and I can let you know how it turned out for us. Anthony Imgrund FCB
