Capacity Planning and the Effort measure in Wrike
Hi,
I wanted to reach out to the community to understand how others are using the Effort measure in Wrike to plan their teams capacity and resources.
For context, we work in a Operations environment, with teams spread across process improvement, systems and analytics, which doesn't have a bank of people performing similar tasks in the projects that we manage. Also the tasks are not always the same as our projects could be anything from a systems architecture change to re-engineering a process for a business team.
Therefore it becomes difficult to estimate effort against particular tasks and also to manage that information update (Effort requires effort!) and therefore report on the teams utilization and workload.
How are others tackling this? For example, do you have someone in the team who does resource/effort scheduling and task timing?
Hi!
I confirm, the definition of effort for each activity needs effort, however it depends on how you use that data.
If you only need it to fill up weeks, ask the person who will have to deal with it to quantify an ideal time. It doesn't matter if it is 100 per cent correct or not, the accounts almost never add up anyway, but at least you have a quantification.
It would then be useful to compare it with the actual time spent (Timelog) to check, how accurate are the efforts entered by the contributors. You will get a Gaussian curve where some of them will have a very close result and others much further away.
This is why I tell you to have employees quantify the time, as it is much better than dropping times from above, because you involve them and make them participate in the work they have to do. A bit like poker in Agile.
The best thing would then be for them to agree these times together with their manager and to check, afterwards, whether they have respected them or not.