Option to Disable Effort Split
I'd like the option to disable the effort split between people assigned to a task. The main problem is the inconsistency with the reports and how they associate the total effort of the task with each assignee. This issue was brought up in the following topic, but I'm proposing a solution from a different direction.
We've set up our Wrike system based on the approach the reports take and treat tasks more like events when it comes to effort. For example, a meeting may take a couple hours. If we decide to have multiple people attend the meeting, that doesn't change the length of the meeting and it's inconvenient to check the number of assignees to calculate the appropriate number of hours to assign to the effort. If a task assigned to multiple people has an uneven distribution of hours, then under our system, a subtask would be a more appropriate option to accommodate and define the split of hours.
We also have a separate "effort left" custom field used in conjunction with effort that doesn't have the ability to split between assignees anyway. We use the effort and effort left to calculate a completion percentage at that is used mostly at the project level using rolled-up values. It would be much simpler and more consistent for us if the effort was not split between assignees so that we could make better use of the workload charts given our structure.
Hi Kevin Miller, thank you for reaching out!
Could you please tell me if you've considered using the Basic effort mode in this case? In Basic, it's always an equal split.
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
Lisa, the problem isn't how the effort is split, it's the fact that it is being split in the first place. I would prefer if say a task had 8 hours of effort, that each assignee had 8 hours assigned to them.
Kevin Miller Thanks for sharing more detail here!
Maybe the daily effort mode could help you? Using it, you can set a specific number of hours per day a user(s) should work to complete the task. The total effort for a user(s) in the task is then calculated as (the number of hours per day * the task duration * the number of assignees). If you shorten or extend the task duration, the total effort is re-calculated automatically.
Could that help? Please let me know.
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
Lisa While that would work for something that is expected to take a day or a very specific amount of days, it unfortunately wouldn't work for a large majority of the work we have assigned. Since we're using this effort to come up with completion percentages, we can't have the effort changing unintentionally when we need to change the duration of a task. Everyone is working on dozens of projects at a time where the hours spent change day-to-day based on priority and possession of necessary information. These durations change frequently as the people switch between tasks. It's really more of the flexible effort type, but it's not manageable to set those flexible hours for every task, so we just need to have a single effort value per task that we have control over.
If it's not possible to add the option to disable effort split, the only other workaround I can think of is to make sure only one person is assigned per task, but it would be a significant effort to make a change like that on our end and leave room for inconsistencies of duplicated tasks created to avoid split effort.
I understand Kevin Miller. While this isn't possible at the moment, your feedback has been reported to our Product team.
Thank you for sharing here 👍
Please let me know if I can help you with anything else!
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