Stretch hours over a Multi-Day project

Hi Paul! Thank you for sharing your use case. The Workload View and Effort Allocation are great, but I think viewing and saving the data as a Table Report or through the Table View are actually the best options in this case. To do this:

1. Open the Table View and click the option to "Add Custom Field". Create a duration type field called "Time Allocated" and apply it to the required levels (Projects, Folders, Subfolders, tasks and subtasks)
2. Click on the arrow dropdown next to the field name -> Aggregation -> Sum
3. Fill in the data for time allocated to tasks and subtasks. This data is summed for the whole Project at the top of the column.
4. The "Time Spent" field shows data entered by users through the Time Tracking tool. This allows you to see how much of the task they have completed at a glance.
5. Since the goal is to track how many work hours are assigned to a certain user, click the filters icon to choose that user as the assignee. Now you will see an overview of how many hours they are assigned to, as well as how much time they have spent on them :) 

This can all be replicated in the Reporting section and saved, so that you would have quick and easy access to the data. Would this help?

I think what Paul ment was to have a time frame and assign the maximum hours for that time frame. I can imagine the following: If the hours are exeeded, the worker get's an alert and the numbers in the table turn to red. Even better: The table shows planned hours and used hours. 

We have a similar issue: a staff member can be working on multiple tasks at the same time, for which the time period is longer than the amount of work the task requires.

For example, they may have two tasks which take one-and-a-half days each, both which can be done within a 'window' of five days. We do this to allow the staff member flexibility in their working time and to allow enough time for meetings, etc to be held comfortably. So let's add add another task on the first day of the week which takes one day.

To a human scheduler – and the person doing the work – this is four days work, over a period of five days, which is a weekly task-to-time ratio of 80%.

To Wrike this is one day with a 130% tasking, one day with a 30% tasking and three days at 0% tasking.

For allocation to be successful, it needs to look at the allocated time and available time across ALL currently live tasks and tell you whether there is enough time in total for the task to be done – just as the human scheduler does automatically in our example – but I don't see a way of doing that right now in Wrike. Anyone?

We have a similar situation, as would many, it seems. A four-day task that you have a month to complete and so might work at it in various windows of time over the month. Tricky. Interested in how others schedule a multitude of tasks like this.

Microsoft Project does it perfect. As always, Microsoft Project is the oldest project management software on the market. They have addressed a lot of issues other pm software will encounter in the future. But it is expensive and not so flexible.  

@Mark, @Nikolaus, @Paul, thanks for adding information here, would definitely love to hear how other teams handle scheduling like this right now (apart from the suggestion Anastasia made above). For now, I'll also go ahead and add a +1 for each of you for some more flexibility around scheduling on the Workload View. 

I used to love Microsoft Project until I found Wrike... Team Collaboration on a MPP file was horrible!  With that said, MS project definitely has some features Wrike doesn't and sophisticated resource load balancing calculations at the daily level is one of them.  But what I love about Wrike is that I can click up and down in my project hierarchy to do this same resource load balancing in a visual GANT format.  That was never possible with MPP.  So in order to get the "top level" view, I always had to keep massive MPP files with everything in it and all these linked MPP sub-project files that always got corrupted because someone changed things.  Wrike lets you do load balancing at individual project levels and at high top levels easily by clicking up through your project hierarchy.

Anyway, with that said, I'm not sure I understand Paul's question; sorry.  Allocation in Wrike assumes fixed allocation across the task duration, correct?  So isn't this the same thing you are describing?  If I have a 4 day task that has a 5 day duration, this shows up as 80% across the 5 days in workload view and I can shift/adjust as necessary to load balance at any level.  If it's completed at day 4, then the 80% allocation is removed and I'm on to something else.  And if I know there is a specific task/milestone that's occurring as part of that task (like the "first draft due" example above), I make sure to track it as a separate task (or sub-task) and put a end to end relationship on it so I know it's due date is fixed to the due date of the parent task (and shifts with it).  If I'm being granular on the allocation tracking, I subtract the "first draft" task allocation from the main/original task and put it on the new task (e.g. 40% on first draft, 40% on the main task).  Otherwise I just put 0% allocation on the first draft since I'm just looking at it as a milestone and not tracking effort hours for that milestone separately from the main task.

Anyway,with that said, the Wrike enhancements that I think would make this load balancing process much better are the following:

• I would love to be able to set allocation at the task:person level so I can have multiple people assigned to a single task and set their allocation individually.  
• The allocation percentage needs to be factored into the analysis screen statistics.  The total duration metric on the analysis screen is not very useful if you are using allocations because the # of hours do not reflect the actual effort hour duration required for the project.  Sine this is viewed side by side with the "time tracked" statistic, it would be much more useful to see the "allocated hours duration".
• Make effort allocation a metric that can be used in report graphs.  I currently look at # of tasks per user per project.  What I really need to do is look at effort allocation hours per user per project (bonus if this would already be on the analysis screen).

Jeni, thank you for commenting on this! I've submitted your feedback to our Product Team. Reading about your workflow and how you use the allocation feature was fantastic, and I'm sure others will find this explanation useful. Thank you again for taking the time to share all of these details!