Resource Management - Data About Resources
We have multiple PMs and BAs managed by a PM and BA practice.
The Practice Managers currently use Excel to track information about contract employees including Contract End Date, Daily Rate, and Contract Agency.
We have been asked if we can use Wrike to track this data, and then report on it - e.g. show resources on projects with a contract end date before the project end date, so that plans to extend or replace the resource can be made with plenty of time.
Obviously we can create custom fields to store this data in tasks - but multiple tasks for the same people will lead to inconsistent data. e.g. if a contract end date is extended we would need to manually find and update all tasks with that resource assigned.
To complicate the situation we also need this data to only be available to the Practice Leads - i.e. we don't want everyone to know everyone else's daily rate.
Has anyone come up with a way to track data like this about resources in a central location, and be able to produce useful reports from it?
We've looked at storing it with the user settings, but we can't include that data in reports that also use project data.
We haven't had to track sensitive data like this, but my suspicion is there is something with User Custom Fields and Data Hub. If you're on the Pinncle plan, you have access to both (we're not). Something like Daily rates could be a user custom field, and a private data table in DataHub could be visible to only the PMs. DataHub also solves the issue of updating it in multiple places, as task custom fields could pull a reference from DataHub so you only have to update the information once.
Thanks, Mike. We're on the pinnacle plan, I haven't spent much time playing with the Datahub yet, but functionally it looks like a simple drop down list for use when entering data into a task. i.e. you click on a linked field, then select the data you see from a potentially long list.
I can't see a way to run a report that looks at an Assignee name and then runs a query on a database to pull the rest of the data about that person, without somebody having manually used that drop down list while creating the task.
Mat Ward - My experience with Datahub was a short trial. We tried using it like an SQL database, where it was a list of records and we could pull specific ones, but because it was a trial, we didn't get very far. We could choose a record, and datahub would pull the linked data (like you said, pick an assignee and the rest of the data comes along with it).
I'd suggest reaching out to your Account Manager at Wrike, as I know they could help you get something started.
The user custom fields were designed to handle things like daily rates for project planning. That info could either go into DataHub or user custom fields.