[Status: Launched 🚀] Resource allocation - controlling hours per day

Hi Tim, it's something our Product Team are definitely looking at. The logic and implementation are complicated for this feature, and the team wants to ensure they get it right. When I have more information, I have this thread bookmarked for updates 👍

@all, hearing use-cases and current workarounds help the team understand the needs of different teams, so please feel free to post them here! And please make sure to upvote the original post y clicking '+' button.

Agreed with commenters re this feature. 

My preference is that if a task will take a total of 11 hours across 4 days, I would like the option to allocate that time to each day. 

Hi Stephen and Stephanie.  First of all, thank you for your hard work and passing on our feedback to your development team!  Now for the feedback.

We have been unable to find an accurate way to grasp how much work someone is assigned to right now.  Counting the number of tasks someone is assigned is faulty since most tasks vary in workload/time.  And as discussed in this thread, Allocated Hours doesn't work as is.  This is the Number One issue we are having right now. 

We need the ability to control what day the hours are allocated to; this will allow the Workload view to be more accurate and reporting to be functional.  Having the same number of hours expected to be spent on a task each day is unrealistic because work demands change too frequently.  Some days you can dedicate 5 minutes to the task, or none at all, while other days you may spend 5 hours on it.  Most of the time you know in advance that one day will be spent in meetings while other days you can dedicate 5 hours on the project. 

However translating that to upper level management so they can see where your workload is at is close to impossible at this time, at least through Workload or reporting.  The same goes in reverse: if the manager wants to let you know how many hours in one day they'd like you to focus on one task, they can certainly send you a note, but it would be great if an employee could just come in and know by glancing at their tasks where they should be spending their time.  This can vary so much every day. 

The ideal for us would be to have the task's Allocated Hours start as an average spread across the duration of the task: i.e. if one task will take a total of 3 hours of the next 6 days, then 30 minutes a day is allocated for that task.  From there you should be able to 1: manipulate the allocated hours manually and 2: if you remove hours from one day then it will appear over the remaining days (and vice versa). Finally it would be ideal if it interacted with time tracking where if you track X number of hours on a task, then it would subtract X from the total remaining hours allocated for the task.

One more quick enhancement request: when you are looking at the workload view, you click on a task, and the pop-up lists basic information about the task (i.e. start date, due date, duration) it would be fantastic if you could also include the allocated time for that task.  (It would also be cool if it showed that more than one person was assigned to that task but that’s a low level request for me.)

Has anyone found work arounds for any of these issues?  We tried working with custom fields but can't seem to get the reporting side of this to give us accurate information: has anyone had any luck?  And reporting has several limitations to use Allocated Hours as it is right now for accurate number.  We need to be looking at this information 4 times a day or more but as it is we are just floundering.

One (maybe) straight forward way to accomplish the feature we're looking for is something like this:

• Add a field called Estimate to the task
• Add a field called something like Allocated Estimate to the task
• A field in the settings called Allocation Method which gives you two options: Allocate Day (current functionality) or Allocate Estimate (new fields from above). 

If the Allocation Method setting is set to the new proposed Allocate Estimate field, then the following could happen:

• The Allocated Estimate field is a numeric field which takes a numeric value (up to 16 hours).
• It then divides that with the Estimate field.
• That new value then determines the number of day's the task should span within the workload and/or timeline view.

The benefits to this option is it allows you to keep the current functionality in tact (well, mostly, I'm sure there's a few methods within your code that are tightly coupled and will need refactoring) for your existing customers that like the way it works now. It also provides your other customers the option to solve this problem from a high-level standpoint while you work on the other features others are talking about within this thread.

Agree with this feature request. We seem to be able to use Wrike well in running most situations, but this area we are struggling to be able to sensibly plan resource allocation - and the planning side of Wrike was one of the reasons we have selected it over the competition. It is very close, we really need to be able to set a task duration, and specify the time spent on it for individual days during that duration and the workload correctly calculate employee totals.

Update! Here is what we're now doing. It isn't perfect but it's working for now.

Every project gets two custom fields -- Total Hours, and Daily Hours. Total Hours is the amount we've budgeted to the task so the person doing it won't go over budget. Daily Hours is the Allocation field renamed and turned into a number (I believe it is a percentage by default).

Next, there is some manual math. If I have a task that is 12 Total Hours, and has a Duration of 4 days, then Daily Hours is 3. Sometimes I'll do this in Excel and then import it when I'm setting up a particularly large project. If there is more than one person on the task, I will divide the Daily Hours by the number of people working on it.

Then, I check the Workload when in the project and choose the Show Full Workload checkbox. If I've totally messed up someone's schedule through adding this new project, I'll drag some tasks around until it fits. I try to only have 5 hours max per day in everyone's workload because this isn't foolproof, especially when there are lots of people on a single task. But, it is helping us set realistic start dates for projects and if a client misses a deadline we know when we need to push their project to as a result.

I still really would love Wrike to make this less manual -- even having the Daily Hours automatically be calculated would be amazing -- but for now it's working for us. We're also a small team and so I can comfortably see everyone's workload on a screen or two without a lot of scrolling. I imagine this would be much harder for larger teams. But I hope it helps some of you!

I agree with the comments above. We just launched, and I see this as one of the biggest shortcomings of the software as we begin to use it for resource management. Simply averaging allocated hours over the duration of the task is not enough.

We need the ability to assign hours per day on the Workload View. For example, if an 8-hour task starts on June 1, and ends on July 1, I would like to ability to assign 4 hours to June 15 and 16, or whatever day(s) those hours. At the bottom of each employee, it should sum up the hours for that day. This would allow us to see how many hours each employee is scheduled to work each day. 

Twenty overlapping tasks with a duration of 15 days each does not give resource managers enough insight into their employees' workload, especially when each task could range in effort from 15 minutes to 80 hours. An employee with 2 hours worth of work could look like they're booked for weeks, and vice-versa.

Same here, as everyone is requesting above.

We need to be able to split the total estimate design time for a particular task across one more weeks, where each day we can specifically inform the designer how many hours has to spend on it.

This would also allow us to compile a daily 'agenda/schedule' for each designer on how he/she has to spend his/her working day.

I'm my particular case/type of business priorities constantly change.

I would also find the features described in this thread helpful. I have a use case that I didn't see specifically mentioned (but may have just missed). I field requests from our account teams and then build out the projects and share the timelines. The gantt view is great for showing how long the project will take at a high level that factors in all the work my production team has at a given time.

For my production team, though, showing their tasks spread out over three or four days is not accurate. Many tasks only take 4 hours or less, but the person needed to work those 4 hours won't have the time for a day or two (thus the gantt view showing 3-4 days).

It would be great if I could show the padded timing in the gantt view but also have a way to show the actual working time in the workload view.

Hi 😀 I've run into the same issue. In addition to what others have mentioned, we have "flex tasks" that are to be completed anytime between the start date and finish date. A flex task may take as little as 1 hour but currently, we can not have a task range that both spans multiple days and also has a more specific allocated workload. It's basically the same issue others are noting... we need to be able to span the task over multiple days but also keep track of how many hours for a day (or for flex tasks a week) a single person has. The only workaround I see now is to create multiple subtasks (on a daily basis) under a master task (that spans over a few days/week/month). The problem with that is creating all those subtasks for each day is time-consuming and a little messy/confusing on the workload view. Glad the team is looking into this!

Hello All, Wrike is relaunching their Workload feature and it includes the ability to allocate hourly effort per day for a task (single day or multi-day). It looks like it's a little buggy at the moment, but stay tuned. I'm sure it will improve in the coming weeks.

How do we test that? I have it open on the labs but don't see the ability to spread out over multi-days or single days. 

@Benjamin Johnstone -- it's a new add-on feature that you have to pay for. Wrike just put out an announcement about it here: https://www.wrike.com/blog/wrike-resource-a-powerful-new-resource-management-tool/

Sorry to say but we find this feature way to expensive :(

Ya, I mean it's a valuable addon but to almost double the price is a little hard to swallow. 

@all, as you've already discussed above, this functionality is available using Wrike Resource so the status needs to change to 'launched'.

If you have further feedback about Wrike Resource please create a new feedback post or contact your Account Manager to discuss further.

If you're using Wrike Resource and would like to know a little more about how to achieve this suggestion please create a post in the How To section and we'll be happy to help 👍