Resource Forecasting Quandary!
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Our annual contracts mean we get a bucket of hours across the entire agency for various projects; some defined, some less so (think production retainer). What we're trying to do is understand how much the team is "spoken for" during the life of the engagement, without a specific assignment (until we get closer to it). The "old" way we tried to achieve this was by dividing the hours among everyone who would be working on it evenly, through the duration of the contract. Obviously this is pretty inaccurate; 1) work never happens this way (ebbs/flows, etc) 2) work needs are never evenly distributed among each team member (developer heavies up toward the end, etc).
As an example of what this looks like then, is that my copywriter is assigned 8 hours a week for the next six months through this method, but when we evaluate the workload for the upcoming week, it's inevitably not true and makes for a messy, inefficient situation.
Does anyone have recommendations for how to solve for this? Really appreciate the help!!!
Hi Iole Whiteford, I've asked our Support team to help you with this, and I can see they've reached out to you by email. Please let me know if that's helpful, or if you have any further questions!
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Iole Whiteford not sure if the support team has helped you find a solution for this yet, but if you need an interim solution we go through a very similar process of projecting out work for the coming year for many of our clients. We have set up a separate space that is dedicated to projected work with a dedicated workflow. The workflow statuses are percentage ranges representing the likelihood of the work landing or starting. All of these tasks are assigned to department-specific collaborator accounts so that they do not impact a specific staff member's availability, but can still be represented in a workload chart to measure against the department's overall availability. As the scope becomes more defined we increase the percentage/status. Department directors then begin re-assigning the tasks to staff members when that status is above 90%.
For AOR accounts, our PMs will go through the previous fiscal year's deliverables with our Account Strategists to identify work that is repeatable, and will duplicate that directly into the new space for the upcoming year. Effort for these tasks is assessed against actual time spent to make sure appropriate time is held.
For project-based work unrelated to retainers, we'll utilize blueprints built to represent the most common path of projects we execute for clients e.g. website builds, marketing campaigns, brand development, etc. These blueprints include average hours required to execute these projects to ensure they are impacting capacity on the workload charts appropriately. As we get closer to landing the work or starting, we adjust tasks to more accurately represent the developing scope.
Account Strategists, Project Managers and New Business meet at least once a month to assess the accuracy of these projections and to identify any work that is ready to be transitioned to a Space that contains all work for the related client.
Jake Yohn thank you so much for the thoughtful reply!! This definitely does help. I especially like the likelihood percentage! Question - how do you account for (if you do at all) reconciling "actual effort" against "placeholder effort". In other words, I've got 300 hours let's say for a specific job role "ear marked" through out the year for a certain role. However, I will "dip" into this bucket of hours to create actual tasks. Do you do a similar thing and then reconcile actual assigned effort vs the bucket of retainer hours? If so, is that as manual as it sounds? lol Thank you so much!
Iole Whiteford We currently do not have a generalized bucket for AOR or other earmarked hours per department/account in our workflow, but when we did it was very similar to the process you described. However, when we did, bookings were broken into monthly periods. That way, you're managing 25 hours per month, as opposed to 300 a year (based on your example). And when we 'dipped' into the bucket, it would not reduce the daily allocated hours over an entire year, but contain it to that particular month/months depending on how long that project or task was.
We utilized Wrike's booking feature in that workflow. Since moving on from that we decided to replace bookings with actual tasks/folders/projects as that is more directly translatable to assignable work.
Part of our New Business and AS/PM workflow goals over the past two+ years has been attempting to develop an SOP that reliably demystifies those large portions of placeholder hours based on repeatable work YoY, proactive conversations with our clients regarding annual goals, etc. This is totally use-case specific and wouldn't really be helpful in a more support-oriented situation that needs to be more reactionary. Not sure if that's your case or not!