Workfront Research Study: Planning without Planned Hours

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

@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

@Vazgen Babayan‚ See above for responses!

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

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!

I am interested in participating.