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Workfront Research Study: Planning without Planned Hours

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Employee

Hi Everyone,

I'm quickly trying to find customers who do not use planned hours. One of the PMs has an idea for tracking work without planned hours. If you're interested, let me know by replying to this post.

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Correct answer by
Employee

Hey everyone,

While our general study has concluded, as Elissa mentioned, we would still be interested in validating follow-up concepts of the solution and specifics of how we approach the problem. If you're interested, please feel free to book time via this link. Please keep in mind that as I am located in Armenia, the available times will be in US early morning/night hours.

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17 Replies

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Level 4

@Elissa Lauber‚ we do not use hours at our organization at this time.

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Level 5

We do but may opt not to in the future based on some internal feedback received in May/June. Am interested in how others not using planned hours manage resourcing and forecasting, if they do that at all. And how they use Workfront data to look for bottlenecks in other ways.

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Level 10

We don't track work and the hurdle we have with tracking work is that because people don't have to log their time, they also don't close out their tasks in a timely manner so we never get a good read on how long things actually take. Would love to hear your PM's idea!

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Level 10

Planned Hours is something we know we should be doing, but because each graphics project is it’s own beast, using Planned Hours has been hit or miss, and frankly, usually miss. So often it's just a wild guess or is taken off a separate spreadsheet of "averages" we update once in a blue moon.

Also, some have found Planned Hours sorta pointless when Workfront provides no way to keep assignees from going over-hours (hard limit). I think some just plug in a number to avoid odd issues when having tasks with zero planned hours, and only do it as they go.

It certainly isn't a metric we currently measure performance against!

So yes please thank you, your particular idea might provide insight.

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Level 5

We try to use planned hours but they don't really work for all of our teams, so although we ask the teams to use them, they don't. We want to use them but some of our tasks are recurring (they happen either every day, or every week for many weeks in a row), so the planned hours do not work for us. We would LOVE a way to see bandwidth/availability for work without using planned hours.

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Employee

@Bettina Sparks‚ @Tammie Bouchard‚ @Jill Ackerman‚ @Kevin Quosig‚ @Erica Foisy‚ If you're interested in talking to me about it, I would love to explain more! I can also post back here after we wrap up the study and explain what he's thinking.

https://calendly.com/wf-product-research/planning-without-planned-hours-v2

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Level 5

Thanks @Elissa Lauber‚. Just scheduled something for next week. Looking forward to the conversation.

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Level 4

@Elissa Lauber‚ I tried to schedule a time but it won't let me see anything after this Friday. Do you have any availability next week? Thanks!

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Employee

Hey @Bettina Sparks‚! I just messaged the PM to see when he needs the study wrapped up. Hopefully, we'll be able to extend it so you can participate. I'll let you know if I can open it up as soon as I hear from him.

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Employee

@Bettina Sparks‚ The PM, Vazgen, said to open up more time slots, so I opened up the following week. Let me know if none of the times work for you!

https://calendly.com/wf-product-research/planning-without-planned-hours-v2

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Level 4

@Elissa Lauber‚ Awesome! Thanks! I just scheduled on for next Tuesday.

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Employee

@Vazgen Babayan‚ See above for responses!

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Employee

Thanks everyone for your interest and @Elissa Lauber‚ for helping to organize the research sessions! Looking forward to your feedback!

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Level 4

We're trying to get planned hours entered but there is a lot of pushback from PMs. It would help if we could do resource planning without entering the planned hours for sure!

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Correct answer by
Employee

Hey everyone,

While our general study has concluded, as Elissa mentioned, we would still be interested in validating follow-up concepts of the solution and specifics of how we approach the problem. If you're interested, please feel free to book time via this link. Please keep in mind that as I am located in Armenia, the available times will be in US early morning/night hours.