Resource Management

Hey Vincent,

Sorry its taken us a while to get back to you! I work with all of our fortune 500 companies here at Wrike, and can provide a bit of insight into your question.

There's a couple different options our clients use to help calculate resource costs,  but it sounds like you need to see time tracked by project multiplied by an hourly rate.  Most customers will do this by tracking time on individual tasks, and will add the 'time spent' column in the table view. Then, they will export these projects to excel and will create another column inside of excel which would be an hourly rate.  From there, they will create a third column that multiplies hourly rate by the time spent, and this will give you a basic idea of resource costs for projects. 

Hope this helps!

As a leader in a software-development consulting company, it would be nice to be able to have:

• Resource revenue rate - hourly rate charged to client.
• Resource cost rate - how much the resource costs us.
• Estimated Revenue and Cost per subtask/task - with rollup capacity (how much revenue to expect from task completion - same as cost to our customers).

--Marc.

Hi Marc! I just shared this feedback with our Product Team, thank you for providing the details about your use case! Although automatic calculations aren't currently supported, it's possible to add Custom Fields which would include this additional information. The values from tasks will roll up to the Project level, but not from subtasks to their parent tasks. To create a new Custom Field, open a Project/Folder in Table View, and click the "+" on the right side of the table to add a column. Here's an example screenshot of what these Custom Fields could look like:

I think the point is that we cannot track resource costs today.  That means we have to associate certain costs to a resource and then do the costing.  I use a reporting tool to do this since Wrike does not supply this capability.  It is a big hole in the Professional Services use case that should be on the roadmap.  My boss reminds me about this every month.

Perhaps I'm stating the obvious, but a scripting language (a DSL, or ECMAScript) which could operate on fields (custom or built-in), throughout all levels of the Folder/Project/Subproject/Task/Subtask hierarchy would be just dandy.

Looking at purchasing this software for our agency, but I couldn't justify this purchase without this ability. To have to manually calculate or use a third-party tool to calculate our burn rate and project costs is a huge problem. What a bummer. Otherwise, very well-designed platform.

Agreed - I have to spend 4 hours a week building reports outside of Wrike to get the information we need to run our team.  THis should be just a click of a button capability.

Dear Wrike,

Is this feature on the pipeline to development? It would be great! Thanks

Hi Estela! Our Product Team is looking at ways to improve the the Reporting experience, and although it's too early to share a timeframe or exact feature set, there are some enhancements on the roadmap :)

@Anastasia - our company is very interested in this feature as well. Why not just add this to profile settings, similar to MS Projects. That way you can pull on this data as needed. Should be simple enough to include into the report functionalities. 

Let's put it this way. Not having this feature is a deal breaker for our organization (ps. I'm currently the one exporting the data to excel to populate and create the multiplication :)

/Henrik

Hi Henrik, thank you for weighing in on this! I understand that this feature is important to your team and others, and we're currently exploring ways of enhancing this functionality. We recently launched a Product Feedback section, and it would be great to continue this conversation there, where other Community members can add their votes and comments too. Looking forward to seeing this request!

Upgraged to Business on a trial basis - 

One person at $100 hourly rate

another at $250 hourly rate - but I cannot assign a hourly rate to any team member --- not much further ahead from professional to business.

Seen a suggestion to send it to excel and add a column a year ago and maybe Wrike working on it. The request been there for quite some time and not added yet. Disappointing.

Hi Troy, thanks for reaching out! I would love to help figure out if Wrike can help. To get started do you think you could tell me a little more about how your team would use (or would like to use) assigned hourly rates? Are you looking to track time on a per user/per task basis? Some of the features on the Business plan (specifically Reports, Custom Fields, and Time Tracking) may help, depending on your use case. Happy to discuss more on here, or if you prefer to talk I can ask your account manager (Evan) to reach out so that you can talk through this a little more as well. 

We recently launched our Community forums (in August 2016) and while we can't implement all requests, having details about use cases and +1s helps us pass feedback on to our Project Managers, so we really appreciate your input here. 

I am often responding to “request for proposals” to government contracts.

Hi Troy, thanks for those extra details! You can use Custom Fields or task duration to designate how much time a particular task or Project should take, you could then create a Custom Field to plan how much time each individual should spend on a task. Here's an example of what that could look like. 

However, the system would not be able to perform calculations based on each teams/individuals hourly rate to figure out how much should be billed for the work done. What you mentioned originally is correct, you would be able to export the data from Wrike to Excel and perform calculations there, but I understand that you're looking for these calculations to be done directly in Wrike. If you haven't already, we'd really appreciate your +1 on this related feedback, we keep track of the upvotes and while we can't implement everything, our project managers do take feedback from the forums into account. If you do think Custom Fields/exporting to Excel could work, let me know and we can talk more about how to set them up for your team.

In terms of your second note: the sort order that you choose in the List View is sticky (and you can sort by start date there), but the system defaults to sorting by title in the Table View. 

Adding my vote to this thread.

I have read everyone's comments or concerns listed in this specific forum and still do not think the question has been answered. Is Wrike going to introduce this functionality into the core product?  If yes, what is the timeline?

Hi John, thanks for commenting here! While it's too early to share any timeframes, resourcing and budgeting is something we're discussing internally, so it's really useful to hear your ideas about this. We have some active discussions going on in the Product Feedback section about this, and it would be great if you could add your vote to the functionality you're interested in seeing:

• Custom Fields - Add More Calculation Methods
• Budget Calculation by Hourly Cost Rate
• Billable Hours Report

Add me to this too.  It would really help me to sell this to the wider business. It seems to be a blocker at the moment.

Any update on when this will be added to the product? 

Hi everyone, no dates to share yet, but as I've mentioned, this is something we're building plans around. :)

Hi Anastasia,

Is this done yet?

We are urgently evaluating a solid PM tool.  We were looking for an all in one professional services management (PSMS) tool that had as good functionality for PM as MS Proj but it doesn't exist in this universe.  SmartSheet is the other product we are looking at. 

The issue is if we can't manage resources and costs (our side vs client side) and then connect this to a PSMS and to our accounting system for managing end-to-end billable and non-billable expenses then that's a real deal breaker.

Regards

Ian

I concur. I have a number of clients with which I need to manage costs and resources.

Hey All - 

Would like to revive this thread as I just had a call with my Wrike CSM and Account Manager today regarding the 2018 Wrike Roadmap. I'd like the Product Team to explore solving for our current use case. 

A couple things first:

1. I'm in charge of overseeing all projects, managing project request intake, prioritization, scoping, and scheduling. That in itself is challenging, but I've figured out a way, albeit imperfect and a little clunky, to see and do most of this in Wrike.

2. The challenge lies in marrying our current and pending projects and their resources with the same resources' BAU (business as usual) responsibilities. 

Scenario:

- I have 3 development projects that I need Resource A for. 

- Resource A spends anywhere from 30-75% of his time on BAU/keeping the lights on, but always has time to work on projects - it's just a matter of how much week to week.

- I need a way to:

a) Very cleanly and simply plan and see how much time every resource in my department plans to allocate between BAU and projects week to week (month to month). 

b) In a sandbox mode, level resources based on estimated effort and % utilization (e.g. If Resource A estimates that he can do 1 project in 40 hrs @ 25% utilization his time on this project is spread over 4 weeks, 40 hrs/wk / (40 * .25) )

c) Very easily allow my user base to see their active and planned BAU tasks and Projects in a single view and quickly throw % or hour allocations at each parent task for weekly planning. 

d) Go back each week and put actual time spent vs. planned time spent for analytics and tracking. Thought being, we get caught up in fire drills so much that it inhibits our ability to finish projects and Wrike should give us a way to tell that story.

e) Flag tasks as BAU, Projects, Time Off etc. without using custom fields.

f) Generate customizable and filterable reporting in both Gantt and table formats by resource and team.

g) Allow users to do time planning at the highest level task (or the lowest level) for simplicity of reporting (e.g. plan time by the project name rather than the numerous sub tasks underneath it)

Take this scenario and extrapolate out to a 40 person team.

Let me know if you'd like to discuss in more detail.

Thanks!

Like the other posts here, we would like to use Wrike to assign a cost per resource, otherwise we cannot properly account for freelancers, etc. who charge different rates.

We'd also like to group resources into resource "types" like Designer, Developer, etc. and thereby set standard rates for our estimates and forecasts, ahead of getting an actual resource on the job.

Currently in Wrike, we can only create custom fields either at a task level or a project level. This is not sufficient for us. Creating a cost custom field on the task itself doesn't address the problem, because if you have two people assigned to the same task, they would both inherit the same "cost". The workaround to use sub-tasks to split the larger task out also wouldn't address the problem cleanly, because we'd have to do it over and over for every project.

Hi all, I don't have much of an update on this at the moment. This is a How-To post which the OP is looking to hear ways other companies manage this feature at the moment, so thank you for your input here.

A feature request thread in the Product Feedback section that you might be interested in voting for is Budget Calculation by Hourly Cost rate. As I outline on the thread, our Product Team are aware of this need and are working to enhance budgeting options. However, this is a big undertaken and I don't have concrete dates/details to share right now. Once I have more information I'll be sure to update you 👍

Hi Stephen,

There's a solution to this problem in another tool (sorry); here's a link to an add-in feature inside Hub Planner: https://hubplanner.com/reference/budgets-and-billing-rates/

This would have exactly what I we're asking for, and would be a true value-add for us. Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Bobbie

Hi folks, I would really value this feature as it would allow me to ditch excel for this programme management work once and for all. 

Also I manage multiple projects at a time and all of them show me at 100% utilisation which doesn help expain my focus to my boss.

I'll try the add a column idea for the later problem. 

Greetings Oliver: Thank you for bringing this up.  Wrike can help you with this but it's a lot of work right now.  You have to enter all of you time in hours to be able to get a look at how burdened you and your team members are.  I managed multiple projects using a single pool of resources and I know how important this is in getting a realistic look at who has the capacity. t would also be helpful in supporting the case to hire more resources.  

It's got my vote.  WIsh I could be more helpful.

I agree with Patricia. The subtasks need to rollup better to review overall capacity planning. Also, for better end of month reporting I need the hours (duration) for subtasks to roll up and total to the the parent task to get project totals.  Overall, the reporting options need to be better.  Your analytics page seems more like the beginning to a better reporting format.