Automate Due Dates, Based On Custom Fields
I'm trying to find a way to harness automations such that I can use Effort to drive the end dates of tasks.
The way I'm working needs to take into account that no member of staff is available for the full number of hours per day. I've tried using the Wrike calendars for this with some success, but the issue is getting the whole plan to automate based on availability. I don't want to have to manually change the length of every task to match how many hours an individual is available on a given day.
My thinking was that this could be achieved using custom fields. So, say I have a new custom field called Throughput and I set this to some number of hours per day (say 5). What I want to do is use the change of assignee to recalculate the end date, based on this throughput and the effort estimate for that task. So, I can set up an automation to change the Due Date and the formula I think I need is something like:
Start Date + Days(Effort /Throughput)
However, all I get here is formula errors, with no explanation of why. I've tried using things like Hours() around Effort and a few other things and it simply will not allow me to divide effort by throughput. Throughput is currently set as a number type, but I've also tried it as a duration and the problem is the same. I can't understand the issue here.
Additionally, I'm finding the access to custom fields by automations extremely ropey. So, I can select one of my custom fields as the field which is changing to trigger the automation. I can also use the custom field in a formula to change another existing field. What doesn't work is when I use one of the automation templates to trigger a change in a custom field. For whatever reason, my custom fields don't appear as targets to be changed.
I haven't managed to find enough in depth help of the automations or formulas to get to the bottom of either issue. It's quite frustrating, as the inability to automate these things (or at least achieve that behaviour by any method) is a blocker to my team using Wrike.
Hi Michael Conland,
the issue you're encountering with new date automations is that they don't currently support parentheses or formula custom fields. Therefore, you need to explore alternative approaches.
One potential solution, if it aligns with your workflow, is to calculate the due date based on the start date and effort. For example, if a task takes 8 hours, and another also takes 8 hours, you could use a formula in the automation to calculate: Start Date + Effort.
In this context, "Effort" would represent the duration in days. So, 8 hours would equal 1 day, anything less than 8 hours would be less than 1 day, and anything more than 8 hours would be more than 1 day.
To illustrate this, I created three tasks with varying effort: 8 hours, 16 hours, and 24 hours. After populating the start date, the due date was calculated by interpreting the "Effort" value as days. This provides a similar outcome to what you're aiming for.
