How do Project Managers track their Time in Wrike?

We do. High-level, we have a project management folder in most of our project plans for our PMs to organize and work their tasks (ie Stakeholder communications, project setup, closings tasks, etc.). We have effort estimates in the blueprints and then the PMs update as needed. Additionally, we have a generic "allocation" task that we assign to everyone at a 5 or 10% allocation for general overhead. Not perfect, but this gets us close.

Curious to hear from others!

I like the idea of an allocation task! 
We are just starting to assign effort to certain types of tasks and projects for the department. It hadn't occurred to me to track my own time. 
Looking forward to hearing what others say as well!

We have a generic Project Management task to track time for anything PM related that is not task specific. 

We use effort to plan correctly task and activities, and also we use Timelogs.

Each day, each people in our company track time.

So we have a big insight for timing in our projects.

We have a Time Capture task for each project plus the ability to utilize categories (Initiation & Discovery, Planning & Requirements, Execution & Design, Testing, etc.).  Anyone including PMs can record time to the Project's Time Capture task.  

We also use the time tracker and make sure all work items are in a project as tasks, even if it means adding them retroactively after work is done so we can get an accurate idea after the project is done how long it took even if it wasn't entered initially during planning. Snapshots in the Gantt chart help facilitate this. 

There is an option to roll up time entries to the project level which will automatically add all the time entries on all of the tasks, which is super helpful. While you can pull time spent into reports, you cannot yet pull effort into reports (see the related thread and upvote the feature request here - https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360030108673--Status-Backburner-Roll-up-effort-in-project-report). You can however view both figures side by side in the table view, so if you get fancy with your filters, there is an okay-ish work around.

Hey folks, great thread! 🙂

I've moved it to the Best Practices section 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lea Labastida Yes, we have created a task for project management in our templates.  However, I have previously requested to Wrike ( wink, wink Lisa) the ability to track at the project level.  This would greatly clean up the number of open tasks we have and provide a clear area for team members to track their time, including those whose work is not discretely defined by tasks within Wrike.  That nebulous time needs a place to go, and the project level would be the best option in our opinion.

We track all of our resource's time (design, programming, modeling, and PM) to compare actual hours to the original estimate.  We set up all tasks throughout the project with the hours of the resources spread out across each sprint.  This allows us to schedule resources to the amount of hours they need per sprint across multiple projects (Workload).

However, Project Management is slightly different. Instead of tracking our time throughout the sprints, we just have a Misc. PM task at the Project level with the estimated time we think it will take to manage the project and track our time in one task which runs the duration of the project.  PMs don't get assigned new work like resources (we just work regardless of time available :), so we don't need to have multiple tasks assigned to us.

On my timesheet, I have a Misc PM task for each project and assign it there (a few other random tasks appear at times). We find this more effective than the multiple tasks. Keeps it simple while still tracking how much time we spend on a project.

We have a "Project Management" category within our time tracker categories. So that way if I can record my time spent on the task/under the project that I am helping with while still tagging it as PM work. I do wish we could track via project level though! Would give a more accurate representation of where my time spent is, rather than skewing the data on a specific task.

I also have a Wrike Projects folder to store anything I am working on that is specific to enhancing our Wrike experience. Whether that is trainings, cleaning up data, setting up new Custom Item Types, Reporting, etc.

Hi Katie Johnson, thank you for your comment! May I ask if using rollups in the New Table view to sum tasks time spent at the project level would be an option for you?

Looking forward to your reply!

Pietro Poli @NathanJones You all mention effort. How are you all calculating Effort?

Lea Labastida - We simply have placeholder estimates in our blueprints based on historical knowledge. For example, we have 2 hours for each email or 16 hours for building a web page. Then the assignee updates the effort as needed. We do not do time tracking but we do ask the team to update ballpark efforts so we have more accurate data as we go. Does that help at all?

Hi Lea Labastida,

we estimate effort both in blueprints (based on historical info) and in other tasks.
Estimate are used to book and assign task properly and not going over the capacity of each assignee.
Then we have a Analyze report that give us info on effort vs timelog.

Ariane O'dea See above. This is the tread I was mentioning you about Effort