How to allocate "effort" for Workload chart?
Community,
I am a new manager wanting to have an overview of the workload for my direct reports. I was excited about the workload feature and I've hit a wall. I would love some tips on how people use the workload charts and how they determine the effort for each task. Is there a formula?
Help a newbie out! 😀
Hi Lea Labastida,
I suggest you to create a workflow chart adding your direct reports.
For each task, be sure to add an effort
Is important also to determinate correct work schedules, to create a maximum roof of hours to work for each reports.
For each task, in our company, we have an ideal budget included in the effort.
We then use the timelogs to check the time actually taken by each employee to carry out the task and a formula (custom field) that counts the savings.
Pietro Poli when you say time logs, do you mean asking each employee to use the timing feature to track their work?
Hi Lea Labastida,
yes! Each employee in our company track their time using "Timelogs" :)
Hi Lea Labastida how are you going with creating your workload charts? I have been searching the community for posts on workload charts and came across yours. We are starting to get more into using workload charts also. We don't have a set formula for effort allocation - at the moment we are just estimating the approximate time each task takes. We did this in consultation with team members. We have the view to compare the effort predicted with actual time spent so that effort can be adjusted for future tasks if needed. However it can be difficult to get team members on board with tracking their time if they aren't used to this. It has been helpful having the overview of everyone's workload even if the efforts are just an estimate - we tend to overestimate as tasks quite often take longer than expected (especially for our design team with lots of back and forth).
Hi Amy Hunter,
tracking the time spent on taks is certainly one of the most difficult obstacles for collaborators to apply.
For us, who do the work reports, for the past 13 years it has become natural to take advantage of Wrike, however we communicate that:
- work reports are useful for keeping track of all the activities we do and reporting any extra activities to be billed to customers
- we have a company BONUS upon reaching a certain margin, so the reports allow us to have this insight almost in real time
- through the reports we know how much budget we have left on long-term orders, to avoid going over