What is best practice to set up a task duration without "time effort" installed (Business License)

Hi, we just started with Wrike and are amazed by its functionality. We try to get our head around how to best set up tasks in regards to their durations. 

Many tasks would only take i.e. 30min, but due to having to wait for feedback from others, this 30min task  might in reality be only finished in 2 weeks. If I put 2 weeks of duration for that task (and all the other tasks in the same way), I am completely over our daily workload, which makes the "Workload" view unhelpful.

What is your best practice in regards to durations for tasks? Would you
a) do what I mentioned, estimate how long the overall time will be to finish the task, although the actual work for it would be much less, so would you include waiting times in your task? or
b) would you put only the real expected 30min as a duration for the task? But then that would mean you would have to move the task from one day to the other, which might make you oversee a deadline?

Looking forward to understand how the Pro's do it. Thank you!

 

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3 comments

Hi Susanne, there is a post in product feedback addressing the need for Lead and Lag time to address this very issue.  Please thumbs-up the original post and provide your request for this.  For now, we're using "soft" time to estimate the total duration a task might take which obviously comes with the same issue you mentioned about over-allocating workload.  This is primarily because we don't have a dedicated project manager to track every individual's workload. 

As for my preference, I would rather see a realistic picture of the total project timeline than trying to be accurate on a granular level.  The end goal is what really drives the business.  As long as the tasks are showing up in the appropriate team member's to-do list, then the total predicted time shouldn't be an issue.  If users are tracking time, you can always report out how much time was spent on each project for estimating future projects.  Again, this is just my personal preference and may not satisfy your company's needs.

Cheers!

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I would second Trevor's recommendation on voting for the fix... 

We use a combination of Wrike Milestones, Tasks, and dependencies. Basically you have the start of the milestone out 2 weeks, and it dependent on the 30 minute task. This way you can continue to move the task on your timeline, and still maintain the delivery view with tools like conflicts monitors

Hope that helps..

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Thanks so much for your answers. I've got the challenge to show our management pretty accurately how much time projects take, and where we have time to add more work to the team members. So over-allocating work isn't ideal in this particular case. I will have a closer look at how to work with milestones, thanks so much for the answers!!!!!

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