Yearly Projects / tasks in WF

[PeterMi]

Hi all, I wanted to see what others are doing in regards to managing projects which continue year after year. For example on my team, we have regular support efforts that continue each year and we track our actual hours in a project named by the year. We aren't really using the project management features in WF in the project other than monitoring the planned and actual hours in resource reports. My question is there any reason why you would need to create a new task or project each year ? The only things that come to mind for me would that the planned hours would get harder and harder to estimate as the due date gets pushed out and also maybe ad hoc tasks would build up over time? Just curious how others manage these kinds of projects. Do you maintain one or copy to a new project each year and why... Thanks! Pete Peter Mitchell Prudential Financial -Business Performance Solutions

[VicAl]

Hi Peter, We have projects that we use for similar reasons (to hold our Ad Hoc and Scrum Team Work). We call them "bucket" or "Team" projects. And I use a naming standard so I know that's their purpose (i.e. Workfront Team Project for my WF Support team). We don't recreate them by year because we don't currently have a need to. If we want to do reporting by a certain year, we can code the date range into the report. Others here might have other reasons to do it by year, but the only reason I can think of at the moment might be if you're worried about having too many objects in the Project. I believe WF starts to get squirrely at 50K objects (tasks or issues). For our size though we only approached that number once for our Helpdesk, but that was after 4 years.

[TheresaGi]

We do the same. We have "Bucket" projects that we create every year to handle Support activities and Scrum Team Work Theresa Gibson Reed Technology and Information Services Inc.

[SarahDy1]

Can anyone provide a sample/screenshot of how you have these set up? We are actually going to launch in Feb (woo!) and will be using bucket projects like you're referring to help with misc. task tracking. This would be a great help in knowing how to configure it so we can put time tracking against those types of tasks. Sarah Dywinski CDP

[CarrieNu]

We break it out by department. This is an example for our Executive Assistants section. We have all the routine duties of each area / role and then a general administrative section for everyone (email, expense reports, etc.). Hope this helps! Carrie Nunemaker Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts

[Kelly_Wehrmann]

We use "bucket" projects from some things. For us we use / create buckets for items that a resource may need to log time to throughout the year, but infrequently; we don't want the over-head to have to create tasks all the time when these come up so the buckets help in that respect. Typically we make these Tasks "fixed dates" that have a Planned Start/Finish that span the full year. The other option is to use General Hour Types, however, since you do not have the ability to add custom forms on this object it's not a good option for us from a reporting standpoint. We rely heavily on custom forms/fields for reporting and when you use General Hours, we get less than desirable results. I do want to caution you about using "buckets" if you are going to use the new resource planning tools... When the new resource planning tools rolled out last year, we started doing some testing to see how it would work for us. Our focus was the People > Teams > Working On tab. We were going to start from the bottom-up to see if we could immediately get some views in front of the managers/supervisors that they could leverage to see where their resources may have pockets of availability to take on some "quick hit" requests. One huge problem was our "bucket" tasks. On the People > Teams > Working On tab, the bucket tasks dominate the view making it impossible to really see a person's availability. Along with the fact that there is really no good way to clear the "buckets" from the view this has never really been promoted as a good solution for them to use. At least not until more improvements can be made (see screenshot). We did find one "hack", but it's less than desirable. We found that if we made the Planned Start/Planned Finish for the Task be the 1st day of the year (1 day duration), these tasks won't take over the view for that period and drop off once you look at time periods beyond that. However, there is a down-side....if you make your bucket task only 1 day, it will eventually drop-off of people's timesheets unless you have everyone go out and "pin" it to their timesheet view, this way it stays no matter what. The challenge with that is getting 250+ users to do that. So I don't consider it a viable option. Admin Kelly-Wehrmann SSFCU

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Thanks Kelly -- very informative. On an untested hunch... If -- on such bucket Tasks -- you were to make the Primary Assignee a dummy user ("Bucket List" came to mind first, but while typing, dropped to second behind "Kick The Bucket"), perhaps it might prevent such Tasks from appearing on the Resource Grid, since if so, you could then reinstate the long version buckets without their overwhelming side effect. Low odds, I suspect, but if you get a chance to test the theory before I do, please let me know how it turns out. Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads