[Status: Not planned] Workload Remaining Effort
One area that I find Wrike to be weak in is the relationship between planned effort and work done to date. There is no tie between how much work we planned to do and how much has been done so far, and thus how much remains. They are completely isolated pieces of data.
For example, if we have a task that is 4 weeks (20 working days) in duration, and we assign an effort of 40 hours of work to be done in that time, the workload will show that the task requires 2 hours per day for the assigned user (basic effort assignment). If that user doesn’t do anything for the first week, then there are 3 weeks left (15 days) to complete the 40 hours of work; which is fine because they have all 4 weeks to get the work done. However, the workload still shows that the load is 2 hours a day for every day of the duration, including the past days that they did not do anything, and all future days. It is not dynamic, nor does it reflect the difference in planned versus executed effort.
The only way to adjust for this is to manually go in and change the effort assignment to Flexible and redistribute the effort day by day. This is tedious and very inefficient when attempting do this for every task, especially long duration tasks.
I would love for tasks to have a “remaining effort” that can be used on the workload charts. If we look at the example above, given the user did not do any work the first week, the rest of the duration (3 weeks, 15 days) still has a remaining effort of 40 hours. Now the effort per day for the remainder of the duration is 2.667 hours per day (40 hours of effort over 15 working days). There is no way to show this in Wrike.
Let’s take it a step further and say that the user had other work to do and was only able to perform 4 hours of work on this task until the last week of the duration. Now they have to focus heavily on this task to get it done in time, with a remaining effort 36 hours, 7.2 hours per day, for the last week of the task (40 hours of effort - 4 hours worked to date, leaves 36 hours of effort remaining, spread across the last 5 days is 7.2 hours per day).
The workload does not reflect this. It doesn’t take into account how much of the effort has been completed versus how much effort was planned. The workload chart still just shows 2 hours per day throughout. This means that when I am planning additional work, it appears that this user is only at 25% capacity, when in reality he is now at 90% capacity because of this one task for that week.
I want to be able to have the option in the Workload view to show the chart based on remaining effort instead of planned effort. Otherwise, the workload view is only as good as the initially planned effort and does not show the reality of how busy everyone actually is at any given time. To truly see the current workload on users, Wrike needs to base it on remaining effort across the duration and if the tasks are completed already or are still active.
I have used another company’s PM platform in the past that based the workload dynamically on how much work remained to be done. So as the work was performed, the remaining workload either went up or down depending on the reality of how much effort remained. This painted a more accurate picture of users’ workload. And the “health” of the task was based on how far off target that workload was.
I think it would not be difficult to have this option in Wrike. It is simply a calculated data field of effort minus time spent as the basis for the workload chart instead of just the planned effort. The chart would be rendered based on one field versus the other. No change to the rendering engine, just the data fields fed to it. A simple display option could allow the choice of rendering based on planned effort or remaining effort. This would be a huge enhancement to the usability of the workload view.
I have created reports and custom fields in Table view to try to replicate this information, but you can’t create the visual aspect of the Workload view. This needs to be an option of the Workload view and not a columnar report to be useful.
Hi everyone, thank you always for your feedback, opinions, and thoughts. We appreciate your willingness to continuously share suggestions and ideas on how we can improve Wrike further. Please be rest assured that these are all heard and shared with the team continuously. We'll be sure to let you know of any updates.
Was there ever any update on this?
Hi Rebecca Burkhardt, welcome to the Community 👋
No updates here at the moment is this didn't get to the roadmap yet. We'll keep you posted if we have any news in the future.
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover
Adding that I too would love this capability.
Thank you, Christina Strayer. This is a big miss from Wrike in managing projects. There is no metric for managing remaining effort versus planned effort. Wish this would get addressed at some point.
We are starting to lean heavily into the planned effort side of Wrike and this is something that I too have come up against. I'd like to add my voice to the many that have long been asking for this feature. Without it we are fighting with one hand behind our backs when it comes to effective control of projects, which is the sole reason for us to use Wrike.
Thank you all for continuing to add your feedback to this thread! Please rest assured that we're passing all your comments on to our Product Team 👍
Hi There,
Sorry I'm late on the topic, but I'm also upvoting it.
I see absolutely no reason why this is not a part of the tool, like many other users here... My view is that there's a difference between an "activity tracking tool", which Wrike is, and a "project management tool", which Wrike pretends to be (and that all of my colleagues here seems to be looking for).
In my organisation, we have been moving over the last year from a very limited "activity tracking" orientation (start-up free-for-all spirit ;)), to more methods, process and organization, in which Wrike has helped us. Now we want to go one step further and properly plan and monitor projects and resources, which we cannot do in particular due to this problem. I've tried to use resource planing: the tool looks good to do an initial schedule, but I fail to see how anyone could really use this feature, without a "remaining work to do" feature ! If there's ONE user of the resource plan, who uses it as a core management resource allocation tool, I really would like to discuss with him how it's done !!
I believe that AI (that you've been implementing lately) is trendy, is fun, is hype, but nowhere as usefull as a proper resource planning feature !!! Priorities seems to be more on the "eye candy / fashion" than on the real value for the professional user...
So has there been any update, 4 years later, on this "remaining work to do" feature ?
Nicolas MONNIER, you are spot on! I have been saying the same thing for years; too much effort put into style, AI, and other non-essential features, and a continual ignoring of true, core PM functions.
I have developed custom fields and spreadsheets to help track the real-world activity based on the data from Wrike, but it is not a perfect solution. I want to see what the effort really looks like from now until the project or task is complete, and Wrike just doesn't do it. Like you have stated, Wrike is a planning tool and much less of a real-time management tool. All of the metrics in Wrike are based on the planned task, not the reality of where the task is. Progress is based on how many tasks are complete, not where each task really is. If you are slow to perform hours against a task, there is nothing in Wrike to tell you that you are now behind the 8-ball on that task and cannot get it done by the due date. Isn't this what Project Management is really all about? I could care less if we have completed 13 out of 29 tasks. I want to know if we are behind or not.
Thank you for sharing your opinion and adding to this thread.
Hey Nicolas and Jason,
I understand your perspective. We do not have any further updates on this, but you can use Wrike Analyze to calculate task effort distributed to a particular person. Please try it out to see if it works for you.
We will definitely keep you informed if there are any changes. Let me know if you need anything else!
Basudha Sakshyarika Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover
Basudha Sakshyarika Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover
Basudha, can you please explain how Wrike Analyze (which I assume is the analytic boards now available in reports) can report on the true status of task and project progress? How is this achieved beyond the typical count of tasks completed and not completed that Wrike generally uses for progress metrics? How can the analytic boards provide a solution to what this thread has been voicing for the past 4 years?
Basudha Sakshyarika Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover
Basudha Sakshyarika Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover
Thank you, Basudha Sakshyarika. I look forward to seeing how this may work.
Hi Jason Pontius please can you update this thread if you manage to get this working via WA? I'd be really interested in hearing about the solution you end up with.
Phil Taylor support was of no help. They said assisting with this kind of thing is outside of support's scope unless we pay them.
I will play around with the analytics boards and see if I can create something that addresses this issue. However, I still believe it's not a good solution as it is outside the bounds of the project management tools; it's a side note, not a core feature.
Other tools I looked it had it baked in. Just like looking at the Workload chart, but showing the amount left to be done, not the amount of work that was planned. I continue to find it astonishing that Wrike has no way of reflecting this in real terms within the bounds of managing the project. Having to use a report or Excel to capture the reality of where you stand on tasks is a big miss. But it is clear that this will never change.
Hi Jason Pontius I feared that might be the case, I've had similar responses to questions I've had about advanced reporting in WA. It's a shame we have to pay extra for the feature and not be able to ask the kind of questions that would allow us to extract real value from it.
As we have moved more towards intelligence-driven project management, I too have found it really surprising that there's no relationship between what was planned and what was delivered. Sadly I think you're right about this being something that will not change.
Hi,
I would be more than happy to have this feature too.
Effort re estimation is a daily job to do as tasks are most of the time more time consuming than it was initially planned.
In my case, it would useful to have the possibility to increase or lower the effort of an on going task and apply the modification only for days to come until due date.
For example : task planned from 22nd of November till 4th of December with 80hrs effort (daily effort is 80/9 = 8,89hrs) but after 3 days I realize that the task may take a little bit longer than initially estimated and the remaning work to do is 72hrs while theoritically it should be 80 - 3x8,89 = 53,33hrs
Looking forward to hear from Wrike Product Team
Best regards,
Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover
Rohan V Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover
This would be a great feature to implement, are you able to share the reasons why it has been seen to be low priority?
Thank you,
Alex
Any updates on this? Has Wrike decided to prioritize this much needed, customer request in order to stay competitive and serve the customer with project management solutions?
Hi everyone, I checked with the responsible team, and this suggestion is not on our current roadmap as other priorities are taking precedence. We will post an update here if there’s any progress in the coming months. Thank you.
Rohan V Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover
Rohan V Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover