[Status: Launched 🚀] Resource allocation - controlling hours per day

Hi Louis, welcome to the Community! Thank you for posting, this is a great suggestion :) 

Hi Louis, Thanks for posting this. I'd hoped for the effort allocation feature to have covered the concept that you've highlighted. Currently, we are using a work around method which is slightly more tedious. We create Sub-task under each main task which allows us to plan the next week how much time we would like to allocate to complete the task. The only issue is that this method create a lot of "task" which complicates things. 

How do we push this as a feature to be updated in wrike? I hope the wrike team would allocate more resources to make the effort allocation more usable. 

Hi Kai, thank your for commenting and sharing your input on this! We launched the Product Feedback section to hear about what's important to the Wrike Community, and it's great to hear the details about your use case, I really appreciate this insight.

Trying out Task-based Resource Allocation, if a task takes 2 days effort (ie. 16 hr) over 2 days, does this mean I need to create 1 task per day?

When i allocate 16hr for 2 days, Wrike Workload view shows 16hr for the first day.

Hi Edwin, thank you for posting here! The amount of hours is allocated on a daily basis, so when you allocate 16 hours they are attributed to each day of the task's duration. If the total amount of hours which should be spent on a task is 16, and the duration is 2 days, the value in the allocation field should amount to 8 hours. I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions about this :)

It really would make sense that if we have a task that will take 6 hours and that is over two days, that it is allocated as 3 hours a day instead of the current way it is set up - 6 hours a day for 2 days. We want to be able to track budgets and workload with a single field.

Hi Dana, thanks for sharing your thoughts about this functionality!

Do you have an update if this feature request is in the current pipeline? If not, is there a projected date that it will be?

Hi Anthony! We're currently working on some changes to the resource allocation experience in Wrike, and this is one of the things we've been discussing. While there's no date to share yet, we're looking at your suggestions here and starting to work on some enhancements. :)

Hi Anastasia - similar to this question/suggestion. As a project manager when creating tasks for the week it would be great to allocate the duration of each task and based on the assignee's workload it would schedule those tasks for the day. So if their 8 hour workday is filled, then the tasks would automatically assign themselves for the next working day.  

A feature whereby a certain number of hours can be distributed over a number of days would be very helpful. 

Please provide updates regarding this. 

Hi everyone! Wanted to say that while I don't have any dates to share for the short term roadmap, this experience is one we're discussing internally, and we definitely look at the feedback here to learn about what different teams think about this functionality. Thank you for contributing! 

I agree with all of the comments above! Please add this feature soon. This (multiplying the hourly vs spreading the hours) is the main reason why we may need to switch platforms. Please help!

I fully agree that the enhancement suggestion #1 from Louis is essential.  

And I would totally use sub-task work around to achieve the granularity if there was a way to roll up the hour allocations to the parent task, so that when viewing only the parent task in a resource view, you would still see the granular sub-task hour allocations across the duration of the parent task.  I often tag only parent tasks with folder tags for "higher level views" so that I don't have to see all the granular subtasks which get re-arranged and separated on the GANT chart.  So if sub-tasks are recommended to achieve the hour allocation granularity, it's essential that the daily hour summaries at the sub-task level roll up and are visible when viewing only the parent task.

For example, If you have a 3 day parent task with 3 subtasks (first day requiring 8 hrs, second day 3 hrs, third day 2 hrs), I would like to see 8, 3 and 2 when viewing the 3 day parent task.

Thanks again for all the use cases and interest in this feature. I don't have any concrete information to share but as Anastasia mentioned this thread is contributing to the internal ongoing discussions so thanks for sharing!

Hi All, 

In addition to being able to spread the hours across the week, the total number of hours showing in 'workload' when using 'allocated hours' seems to be incorrect, that is, the total number of hours for one member of staff for a full week shows as for example 160, when it is actually only 59  - task hours are simply being duplicated across the days of the week? This is the one feature that would stand Wrike above the rest as it then would plug the resourcing gap, is there a way of prioritizing this as an update do you think, given the commonality of the issue?! It is a key element that would convince my agency to take on Wrike as an all agency solution over our current systems, please help! 

Thank you 

Stacey 

Just to add that this particular feature as described by Louis is for now the most urgent one to work on for our internal use. Today workload estimation is key but way too complex... Thanks a lot for the updates to come. 

@Stacey, thank you for posting here! I wanted to let you know that this is already one of our priorities, and while it's a process to design, build, and implement features, this one gets a lot of attention from our Product Team. Your ideas here do make a difference when it comes to our internal discussions, so I definitely appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts. @Anthonina, thank you for chiming in too!

Please make this switch Wrike, the current setup is illogical.

up voting for this item, I second most of the previous comments. This is a critical piece would would like to be able to utilize. Any current updates on expected timeline for implementation?

additionally, if there were the ability to divide effort among assignee's. For instance, if task takes 5 hours, assigning 2 people to task with 1 person accountable for 2 hours of effort, and the other responsible for the remaining 3. 

i agree will all the previous comments.

This is an essential feature to be able to do easy resource planning

Allocate total number of hour for task, divide number by days worked and employees assigned. if the period worked is shortened, the average number by day go up. 

if on top of that there is more granular division of the hours that would be great, i.e. empolyee  x on does 20% of time, the last employee the remaining time

H everyone! We're currently researching possible enhancements to this area, and I wanted to reiterate that your feedback plays a role in the process (our product teams track the requests here). Thank you, everyone, for sharing your thoughts and concerns here. While big updates can't be immediate, all of these posts play a big role behind the scenes.

I'm also looking for a tool which make ressource allocation possible in a similar way as with MS Project. This might be the reason for not picking Wrike. We all have different task during the week - so we need hours allocation within a start/deadline. Eg getting an 5 hour task on monday having to deliver it on Friday would be divided into 1 hour a day for the week. So both options either by hours divided into the days the project last or hours allocated to one project. 5 hour project delivered within a day. Also being about to define the different ressources' workload. fx Peter can only work 4 hours each day (50%) - sinceone might have people working part time, being booked in meetings for a good portion of the day,and so on. I can see this has been an ongoing discussion since january - what is the status for this function ?

We are currently testing wrike - Resource Allocation is most crucial in our evaluation.
I want to share the following scenario:

____
In my personal calendar I have defined possible working time of 9h each day

It is Tuesday morning, 7h
– I define a task-M with (eg.) 20 hours. This task has medium priorisation.
– I will work on this task-M from Tuesday to Friday (fixed delivery)
– On Tuesday (today) there are already dedicated 3 hours for some issues
– Wednesday is completely blocked for external Meeting
–> Wrike automatically places 6h on Tuesday / 0h on Wednesday, 8h on Thursday and 6h on Friday

It is Wednesday evening, 22h.
After the meeting I realize, that I have to squeeze in most urgently an additional task-Z on Thursday, which will take additional 6h. This task gets the priorization "burning, top level" and shifts every other task. I get the warning, that my fixed delivery of task-M gets resceduled to Monday.
I peek in my resource calendar, it shows for task-M: Tuesday 6h, Wednesday 0h, Thursday 3h, Friday 9h, Monday 2h

Solution: If I enabled 12h on Thursday, I could stay in time and still deliver on Friday.

That means, that the priorization of tasks would have an effect to whether a task shifts or gets shifted by new intruding tasks.
____

This would be my favourite way of handling tasks.
Is this the way you plan to handle this aspects in future?

Hi Andreas, I'm definitely a planning person, so I really appreciate that example and the type of insight you would get from the types of features you're mentioning. Right now, things are very much in the discussion stage but as we get more information, we'll keep you updated. In the meantime, that's an interesting example for us to be able to share with the team. 

If you have any questions while you're evaluating Wrike just let us know!

I am a wrike Newbie, but have run up against the same problem as I think is covered in this thread.  Correct me if I am wrong, but currently effort is linked to duration of the task by either a % allocation or by specifying hours per day?  Fundamentally, effort and duration need to be decoupled in order for project managers to have the flexibility to deal with day to day tweaks in the plan.  There was a suggestion above that it should be possible to specify the total effort, then wrike would calculate the hours per day.  Then if the duration is changed, the effort would remain the same and be divided over the new duration period.  This would work for our projects and tasks.  

I can see a workaround using custom fields, but I can't see a way to make the workload view work then.

Hi Simon, welcome to the Community 🙌

You're correct. Allocation is expressed either by a duration of hours or percentage. However, just to confirm, the allocated effort you apply is not split over the scheduled days. So if you apply 100% effort over 4 days, you will have 100% for each day, not 25% for each day. Any questions on this, please let me know.

You mention that the Custom Fields you're using to track this is not showing up in the Workload View. Have you turned Effort Allocation on in Wrike labs? Once you do this, a 'Beta' Custom Field will be available in Table view called 'Allocation' and this is where you can specify the effort. This information will then show up in the Workload view.

I hope that helps and there's more information available in the Help Centre article. Any questions at all, just ask 👍 

It would be great if you could enter (or have users enter) their available hours per day vs assuming 8hrs of availability. I have several users who may only have 15-20% of their time available for project work, meaning they may only have 6-8hrs/week available for project work.

If Wrike could accept these values then I'd be able to quickly see if a resource is being over-allocated between their day-to-day duties and project duties, allowing me to redistribute priorities accordingly.

Is this potentially on the roadmap?

Hi David, this is something our Product Team is looking at closely at the moment. I have no concrete info to share right now but I'll keep this thread updated when I know more.

Use cases really help our Product Team understand the request so thanks to everyone here for sharing 🙌

We're just getting started with Wrike and this feature request is something we would also support. From the thread, it looks like since June it's been a topic of discussion within Wrike's product team. Is this feature something we can expect soon or should we plan on a different process? 

If we should start planning on a different method than the requested features listed above, I would be interested to know what others are doing as a work around. Just using a custom field and not relying on the workload screen or something else entirely?

Keep up the good work Wrike team and thank you!