[Status: Launched! 🚀] Report - Team Utilization

Hi Bojan Dremel! 🤗 I can see that my colleagues passed on your question to your Customer Success Manager 👍

Please let me know if you have any other questions, I'll be happy to discuss! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

This needs to be more than passed on to an individual's success manager. This needs to function as sold. We just bought and migrated to Wrike because of a unified reporting experience to get a line of sight on team utilization. Not taking into account capacity from workload or working schedule makes this complete worthless and sends us back to manual calculations. Is this going to be addressed or did we just sink expense into a product that was not as advertised?

Welcome to the Community, Ryan Ruud! 🙌 Thank you for letting us know your feedback! It will definitely be passed on to our team. The reason we pass on this information to your Account Team as well is that they can dive into the functionality with you and provide a solution or a workaround for your specific needs. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi,

I am extremely interested to know what the solution is for this.  Individual capacity and time entered in tracking are not linked for us either, making utilization impossible to track without massive manual effort involving merging multiple sources of data.  Unworkable as is, a major obstacle to user adoption and stops any reliable visibility for the management to steer the business. Would be interested to know what other solutions have been.

Welcome to the Community, Catherine Cole 👋 

Thanks a lot for reaching out and posting your feedback here! I'm going to ask your account team to reach out about this and discuss your use case. I don't have an update from our Product team currently, but your Customer Success Manager might be able to make some suggestions in relation to this. 

Please let me know if I can help you with anything else! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

We are having similar issues with the utilization report. Using a time frame of last month or this month assumes a 4-week month with 8-hours per day capacity. This is not taking into account the actual working days in a month or the individual's actual working schedule (including PTO) which makes not only the capacity totals incorrect but also the billable and total utilization percentages incorrect and therefore not useful at all. 

The built in Team Utilization report is basically useless for anyone who has any kind of deviation from 40h week.  No dates right now provided by Wrike on making this work (info as of Apr 13, 2022).  We built a workaround:

1) have users properly mark their days off in Work Schedule as Vacation or Other Non-Working.  This will decrease their available days of capacity.

2) make sure each user has the correct capacity set in a single dedicated Workload chart (soon to come, per Wrike:  ability to enter capacity for each day of the week directly in the Work Schedule.  until then - set up one Workload chart for all people you need to cover, and set Custom capacity there, if it's different from 8h per day. So, if you have someone working 80% with shortened days (ie 5 days a week, but shorter than 8h) enter 6.4h as custom capacity.  If you have someone working 80% by not working on a specific day (say, Mondays) - create a custom Work Schedule for them and set all Mondays to Other Non-working).  You can then:

- export that specific Workload chart that contains all the people you need, with all the correct capacities set

- export Time Spent report for the same people (covering time bookings in all Spaces concerned)

- Workload and Time Spent report must be for the same period of time (ie March 01- 31)

- Time Spent needs to be downloaded (it comes as .xls) then saved as .xlsx (otherwise the Time Spent values will be all funky)

- >Cross-reference these using Power Query in Excel:

- Workload chart export will show you the Total Capacity for the period you exported for as well as for each day within it.  You would need to manipulate it in Power Query to remove unnecessary columns and unpivot Capacity columns. 

- Time Spent (converted to .xlsx first) needs to be on Task level and not grouped on anything.  You would need to instruct Power Query to multiply the Time Spent column values by 24 to get normal looking values.

- For each of the export files  (ie for Time Spent and the Workload) you need to create a unique ID column that will be identical between the 2 files, something that you can merge both files on.  I create a column titled "Merge_ID" = [Person's name]_Date.

- I recommend  - while in Power query - also extracting Month Name and Week of the Year from the dates - that way you can use them as slicers in a later Power Pivot (see screenshot).

Creating this flow allows to drop exported files into  specific folders and re-run a once built Power Query (disclaimer:  Workload export requires manual Power Query adjustment once a month, but then you can drop as many updated versions for the past months as needed, as long as you have the export always covering the same number of the (same) days).

There is a bit more to it for those who don't use Power Query regularly.  Happy to share details if you run into issues.  Happy to hear pointers from those who've built something more advanced, too!  But at least we get the data for reporting.

Hi Jennifer Wood, Catherine Cole!

Thank you Jennifer for sharing your feedback, and thank you, Catherine, for sharing your workaround, much appreciated!!💚

Hi We have a 37.5hr working week. Can I get the Team utilization report to relfect this as I can;t see how to change it from 40 hours? 

We have the daily capacity set at 7.5hrs Mon-Fri.

Thanks

Hi Greg Gibbs, thank you for your input. At the moment, the default capacity on the Team Utilization report (eight hours/day or 40 hours/week) cannot be edited, while the Custom daily capacity specified in Work Schedules is reflected on Workload Charts and in the Resources view.

I think that it would be a great feature to have customized capacity in the reports as well. Please make sure to upvote this thread - it will help us understand how many teams are interested in this enhancement. You can learn more about the way we work with feedback in this post. Do not hesitate to contact us with any further questions or comments 😌

Lisa K. Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa K. Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Thanks Lisa-K

Does anyone look at similar threads and collate all the up votes? I've seen similar posts for this and other areas of improvements but individually they may not meet the required votes but together they would.

Hi Greg Gibbs, there is, unfortunately, no way for us to merge the threads but we do look at the total number of votes and pass it on to the team. 

Hi there, Is there an update on this?  We are not able to track utilization properly when public holidays and vacation are not factored in.

Our workaround is to add 'placeholder wrike tasks' which people have to log time on, for holidays and public holidays, which is a waste of time when there could be a field for 'non-working days hours' we could simply subtract from total capacity, for example.

Thanks,

AM

Hi Anne-Marie Azopardi Fuller, thank you for checking in, no news for now. We'll be sure to let you know if anything changes here.

Hi Community, i am hearing that the Wrike product team is currently planning for next quarter (Q4 2022) and in the next couple of weeks it could be known if fixing the Utilization report will fit into Q4.  I suggest that all of you activate your companies and have your colleagues upvote this thread. Furthermore, please contact your Wrike rep and have them escalate this asap.  

In my opinion, this has been a lemon sale - we were told that Wrike would enable us to track Team utilization, but it does no such thing.  Assuming that every Wrike user works 40h per week is egregious. Besides, Wrike *does* have the (almost) correct capacity information  - it is fed into Workload charts via Work Schedule settings.  Of course, Work Schedule must be enhanced to allow non-full day absence booking for it to work 100% correctly.

The workaround to get a correct Team Utilization report consumes resources - which we planned to avoid by bringing Wrike in. We are paying to continue to do what we had been doing manually before AND we are paying Wrike, even though they don't deliver what they promised.

Contact your Wrike rep now and tell them this must get into Q4 2022 planning.

Hi Catherine Cole! Thank you for sharing detailed feedback here, and I apologize for the late reply here, I needed to check with the team internally.

I understand where you're coming from with this feedback and I really appreciate you posting this call-out to other Wrike users to bring this up with their Wrike representatives. 

I'm very happy to let you know that our team is currently working on adding the capacity information to the Team Utilization report 🥳 We'll keep you posted on when it's ready for release. 

Please let me know if I can help you with anything else! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Hi Lisa and team!

I am very happy to hear that, and i am sure all peers who have posted here will be.

Can you please-please-please remind the product team to include the ability to book partial = non full-day = absences in Work schedule?  It is a must for a fully automated utilization calculation.  Right now our staff (and i see from other comments that it's a common practice) book non-full day absenses on a dedicated task.  Without incorporating partial day absence in Work Schedule, there would still remain the need for manual adjustments, which would still mean having to export data from Wrike, deduct those hours from available capacity and from time booked on a task.  That would mean that Wrike users would still not be getting accurate information directly from Wrike screen. 

My rudimentary vision for that is: when people click on a day to book an absence, a window pops up to enter the number of days or Full day option.  That capacity would then be decreased by the number of hours entered.

Happy to be a sparring partner to the product team on requirements and flow.  

Thanks again!

Hi Catherine Cole, we are passing on all feedback we receive on the Community to the team, so please be rest assured your feedback is shared🙋🏻‍♀️

Hi Cansu, thank you.  The fix that was rolled out this week is a great progress!  Team utilization now shows capacity calculated based on Work Schedule entries.  2 points to pass on to the Product team please: 

1) there needs to be a way to mark a partial day absence in Work Schedule.  When people are sick for half day, for example, currently there is no way to decrease their capacity for that day by these few hours. We still have to apply a workaround by exporting data from Team Utilization report, exporting Time spent report, filtering Time spent for special "leave" tasks that we set up for that person, and then manually decrementing capacity and time spent by these hours.  Result:  100% data is not available to managers until all these manipulations are done and published to them in Excel.

2) in Team utilization report for some reason the only options for time frame are: This Week, Last Week, This Month and Last month. Where are the usual other options we have in all other places in Wrike: custom time frame and all time??  We need to know how the u-rate is trending and what the total is for the year.  Again, this sends us to exports and workarounds.

Thank you in advance

Thank you for sharing in detail feedback and your use cases with us Catherine Cole!

Dear Team,

The recently updated Team Utilization report is missing some usual time frame options.  The report only provides This Week, Last Week, This Month, Last Month options, whereas other Wrike reports have additional categories, and i am specifically missing Any Date and Custom Time Frame.

This is hopefully an oversight, because Team Utilization report is a great tool to monitor submission of timesheets, but without the custom time frame it's not usable.  Example:  we do our financial flash reports for end of month revenue reporting on 27th of the month.  That needs all timesheets must be in for the period of 1-26 EOD.  If Team Utilization had custom time frame, i could set these dates and know who has entered their timesheets to 100% of their capacity.  Without that functionality i cannot do that, and i am back to having to export data from Wrike, cross-reference it with Time Spent, and do all kinds of pre-21 century things.  Can you please look into it and update to match other reports?

What is the status of this? We cannot wait for this fix for 3.5 years like we waited for the capacity fix on Team Utilization report. Please address.

Hi Catherine Cole, I'm checking with the product team to assign a status and will update you here when I have any news🙋🏻‍♀️

Hi Cansu and community, this has been done.  Additional time frames for Team Utilization report – Wrike Help Center 

Please upvote!