Cancelled: Welcome to the Project Management section

We have been using Wrike for about a year and a half. I am happy to say that we have increased adoption by our team exponentially.  We are using Wrike mostly with the Waterfall or mixed Waterfall/Agile (loosely) methodology.  I need to move our team to to a truer Agile methodology. I would like to open the discussion on some tried best practices. 

Our team is new to Wrike. We moved away from our previous digital project management system, in March. So far we really like it, but are having a very difficult time resourcing our team, and having the ability to see if any team members are over booked, have availability for new projects, and include any forecasting. Anyone having success with the Workload view that can help our team? 

Hi Brit, Do you enter the correct amount of time that each task will take?

Hi Brit: This is one of the areas we are looking to have Wrike enhance.  The process is a bit manual right now and will work if you use the allocation custom field.  It's a bit too labor intensive for the number of resources and projects/tasks we have.  I generally use planned hours and pull a resource level report (by task with roll up to project). 

We have been using Wrike since February 2015 and like it quite a bit.  We also cannot use the workload view to resource our team or use it to ensure we do not have over allocated resources.  We have to do manual manipulation of the data once exported out of Wrike to get the information we need.  It has been the topic of discussion with our success manager quite a bit and I know they are looking to improve this feature down the road.

There is strength in numbers.  Let's get Wrike to work on the getting the resource view to a place where it's useful for our teams. 

They have a good start.  

Fully agree Patricia!

We do enter in the correct amount of time each time, Danielle. The main issues arise when we have long projects, say 100 hrs worth of work, that can be done anytime over the next 60 days. It would be great to have the time allotted interact with the days it takes to do it, and adjust the percentages accordingly. Especially if there is time put to the job. Ideally all those custom fields would work together to provide the correct percentage allocation of the task. 

We also run into issues when there are multiple people on the task, as it looks like both teammates are over booked, instead of splitting up the allocated hours. We've created some good work arounds, but I feel that there is a way to make the workload view much more resource friendly. 

Please let us know when improvements can be made! Our team would be overjoyed. The workload view was part of the reason we purchased Wrike and not being able to utilized as we had thought it would work, has been very frustrating. 

Is there a manual / master reference somewhere? 

Hi Byron! I noticed that you posted the same question in another thread too, and wanted to let you know that I've answered it there: here it is :) 

Brit and Patricia - I'm in the same boat as you! We're a relatively new adopter only July 2016, but a clearer way to view individual workload would be GREATLY appreciated. I think Wrike has a good start but it's still not simple for management to get a clear view of current and future work. 

my company is working with wrike since 2013 

the most important property of wrike is the support team 

any time , any question I asked , they answer as soon as possible 

Any update on resource forecasting?  This is the only thread that popped up for me.  If not, does anyone know of a tool that integrates with Wrike?

Hi Valerie, thank you for commenting here! Our Product Team is thinking about ways to improve the resource planning experience, and I'd really love to hear some more about what you're looking for in this space. Do you see this being based in the current Workload, or managed from a different view?

Hi Anastasia!  Thanks for the reply.

We were thinking a separate view would work best.  Where we can see all employees across the board, and all of the projects they are working on.  This view will hopefully tell us who has bandwidth and who is maxed out. 

Since all of our employees are not always working on projects, we would need a way to account for the "day-to-day" work.  For example, I'm 20% projects and 80% retainer work.  My current workload in Wrike doesn't account for all of the other work I have going on.

Does that help?

Val

Valerie, thanks for following up! Yes, that helps. I also wanted to mention that there's an option to view the workload across all Projects at once, in case this helps with the first point you mentioned:

I did see that, thank you for reminding me!

Is there a way for us to see this workload without dates being added to the duration? 

@Stephen, Understood, however, I'd like to know if we can see the workload meaning the amount of time total allocated per user... without having to generate a report, but rather, something we can see live. 

For example: I am a PM and am working with my team going through our backlog to chose our tasks for our upcoming 2 week sprint. We do not have due dates since they are in the backlog. If we add dates, it would all be guesswork that would turn into inaccurate reporting as well as unnecessary noise and notifications for those who entered the tasks/assignees. We do have the duration of the task added in with the amount of time needed for each person to complete that task as well as the priority level for that task. We have 80 hours per developer to allocate tasks too.  As tasks get chosen from our backlog folder, we then move them into our future sprint folder, but don't have a way to view how many hours are allocated per user unless we generate a report every time we add a task, or if we manually add the hours. If we were able to see the workload per user (maybe a button that could get clicked saying "include un dated tasks" or something where we can see the amount of time a developer has within their workload, that would be incredible. 

Since duration is linked with the start and end date, we are unable to just assign tasks to start at the beginning of the sprint and the due date at the end of the sprint. Doing that creates a whole other slew of problems affecting things like dependencies (which we cant really do either because dates are mandatory), reporting, notifications, my work, ect. 

Hi Maria, jumping in quickly for Stephen here. I think what you want is to be able to see how much work is associated with a person, so that you can see how much bandwidth they have (or don't have) for more projects. I don't think you need anything particular for the layout of the Workload View, but let me know if I'm incorrect.

A actually think a Report would be helpful in this situation (and these auto-update). Here's how to run the Report I have in mind:

1. Click the Reports tab.
2. Select Build Report from Scratch.
3. Select tasks.
4. Choose the Folders/Projects which you want to take into account when creating the Report - only tasks from the Folders you select can appear on the Report. 
5. In the filters column: choose "All active" (or whichever statuses you want to include).
6. Click Table.
7. Group by: assignee.
8. Click Save & View.
9. On your Report, click the gear icon and make sure the box next to "Duration" is checked. Check or uncheck any other boxes depending on what you want to see on the Report. 

Let me know if that helps with what your team is looking to see!