High Level - Resource Allocation
The Scenario:
You have 40 projects that are currently being worked on and have 50+ employees that are assigned to these projects. At any given time, each person can be assigned up to 40+ tasks with various deadlines. Viewing the workload tab will no longer be very useful at the parent level as there are far too many rows of tasks assigned to any single person.
Possible Solution:
What I have been toying with is creating a separate folder for resource allocation and cross tagging Parent tasks from several projects to said folder.
The Problem with the Solution:
The problem is that the subtasks will also automatically get cross-tagged. Is there a way to remove the cross tags from the subtasks?
Critical Information required for effective Resource Management:
1. Which projects are the employees assigned to?
2. What activity is being performed on any given day/week for projects by the employees?
3. How heavy is each employee's workload?
Ideal situation would be to get the answers for the above questions in the "Workload" tab in a user friendly way.
Other Workarounds (not ideal):
Companies can build a folder & project dedicated to resource allocation and create the same high level tasks on all projects there. The problem is that managing it will become very painful; there will be a lot of duplicate effort whenever there are resourcing and timeline changes.
Additional Information:
I've spent some time reading the forums and have found a lot of documentation on requests/and or specific solutions. Please correct me if I'm wrong but the following is something that has already been requested:
Resource allocation via hours spreading over a specified date range. This is to say that if I create a task that requires 40 hours of work and have 20 days to accomplish said task, Wrike will be able to specify that 2 hours of the assigned employee's time for the 20 days will be spent on said task. Furthermore, should a PM decide to manager the employee's time on a more detailed level, they would be able to outline how many hours should be worked on said task on each particular day.
This will definitely be helpful in identifying how heavy someone's workload is.
Just following up to see if anyone has any suggestions.
Sorosh Saberian Trajectory Inc
Hi Sorosh, welcome to the forums. I'm sorry for the delay in replying to you and thank you for taking the time to break everything up so nicely, this is a fantastic post!
Tracking Workload:
I think you want to easily see how much work someone has assigned to them at any given time, or within a certain time frame. Let me go through each of the critical features you mention one at a time to keep things organized.
1) Which Projects are employees assigned to? You can run a Report to see which Projects someone is assigned to. The Report shows Projects where someone is assigned as the owner. Our Reports page has step by step instructions on how to run a Report, you just want to make sure that you create a Project-type Report, choose the appropriate Projects to include, and add filters for assignees and time frames if you want. There's a lot that you can do to choose exactly the criteria you want. Another thing to keep in mind is that only Projects show up (not Folders or tasks). If you do want to run a Report on tasks you can do that too, you just have to run a task-based Report instead of a Project-based Report.
2) What activity is being performed on any given day/week? Did you want each person to see what they have to work on or do you want to be able to see what others are working on? Either way, I think Dashboards are a good way to go. The way you build them just differs. Let me know whichever option you think is better and we can talk through how to get things set up.
3) How heavy is each employees workload? I think creating a Report or Dashboard would help you get a feel for this. Given your use case, I think that Reports could be more helpful because you can collapse Report a little bit so that you don't need to see each individual task but see an overall task count for each person.
Resource Allocation:
I love to hear you've been going through the forums! You're right, that is something that others have requested. If you haven't already, could you add a +1 to Louis's post?
Looking forward to hearing back from you and setting something up that works better for you.
Hi Stephanie,
Thank you for getting back to me. I understand that I can use dashboards/reports to dice up the data. The problem is that reviewing such data will be very time consuming.
It would be great if you guys could add the functionality that already exists in the "timeline" tab whereby you can expand or collapse subtasks from it's parent task to the "workload tab". By collapsing all the subtasks, I would be able to:
1. Identify projects that employees assigned to via the prefix of the parent task
2. Identify which activity is being performed on any given day/week for projects by the employees via the task itself
3. Identify workload of employees via how many tasks are assigned to each one (Louis's post would help clarify this further).
My current workaround: I've created a custom field and have had to identify tasks for all projects which I wanted to see in the workload tab and filter for that custom field for our portfolio.
Sorosh Saberian Trajectory Inc
Hi Sorosh, I understand. One more question for you: is it crucial for someone to be assigned to the subtasks? (I completely understand if it is, I just want to double check and learn a little more about your use case).
In terms of your suggestion for collapsing subtasks (the same way as is currently possible on the Timeline View), I can see how that would help in your situation. Could you create a new post in the Product Feedback section with this request? That would help us both so that we can show it to our Product team and other people will be able to find it and upvote it.
Hi Stephanie,
It's very important to have employees assigned to subtasks. For example: A parent task could be managed by a senior consultant while it's subtask would be handled by a junior consultant.
I will create a request in the link you had provided, thank you.
Sorosh Saberian Trajectory Inc
Hi Sorosh, that makes sense. Thanks for the extra information :)
Hi Stephanie and Sorosh. I'm, also interested in seeing a fix for this. If I understood the chain above correctly then I think we have the same issue. If a single member of staff is assigned to four tasks that run at the same time then the Workload view predicts 32 hours to be worked on a single day. What we are actually saying is that the member of staff will be working on four task during an 8 hour day.
Ideally, a task would be scheduled for a duration, say 2 weeks and then resources allocated to the task would be scheduled to take part for a fixed duration, eg. 40 hours (1 week). Ideally then the programme would also be levelled so that the standard 8 hour day is not exceeded unless the task duration (i.e. the 2 weeks) is a constraint, in which case the daily hours worked increase to accommodate this.
This is how MS Project deals with it (which I approve is intended to be more detailed) but as it stands, the resource/workload management aspect of Wrike is not effective.
Is there a plan to do something with this?
Thank you.
Michael
@Michael Our team is in the process of thinking about resource allocation! Can't guarantee that the specific functionality you're asking for will be released, but in general improvements in this area are top of mind for us.