Plotting out a month worth of work to 6 employees on 30 projects
We love Wrike. It's been super awesome.
One feature that is lacking is the ability to really schedule out a lot of projects and tasks for an employee, in particular with a calendar view.
We plan out months worth of tasks at a time for our staff. With our old project management system, we saw a hybrid of a calendar and Wrike's "Timeline". You could see the month and drag stuff around and easily get your 4 weeks of stuff planned out nicely.
The timeline is all we have to use for this now. It helps, it really does, but it is more difficult to plan tons of tasks and projects for a month in it.
How do others plot out a lot of work like this for their staff?
Hi Ryan! The Workload View is great for scheduling tasks and managing resources, have you had a chance to check it out? This view resembles the Timeline, but it groups tasks by assignee and allows you to drag and drop tasks to available users.
To get the most out of the Workload View when working with multiple projects, our Customer Success Managers recommend organizing all of the projects within one folder (if needed, you can use folder tags to include a project in multiple folders). When you open up the Workload from the parent folder, you are able to easily plan out all underlying tasks :)
P.S. Wrike loves you too!
Hi, we are evaluating Wrike and I have a question about the workload view, as we have the same need as the OP. Can you please help me understand why Wrike approaches allocating time on a task in the following manner?
Let's say I have a task called "write creative brief" and I know it takes 4 hours to complete. I want to give the person who it is assigned to a full week to complete the task. I assign the task on August 1st and it is due on August 8th. It only takes 4 hours to complete, but those 4 hours can be used in any combination on any of the days between 8/1 and 8/8. In the workload view, Wrike assigns the 4 hours to every day. That in essence makes it look like the resource is encumbered 4 hours x 5 business days, when in fact they are only committed to 4 hours over the duration. Thus, the Workload view overstates their commit level.
Are there plans to enhance the logic? Because the way you have implemented it requires offline math to compute the real # of available hours in a given duration. Such math calculations are totally inefficient at scale on a single project, let alone with many tasks on many projects spread across dozens of resources.
Thanks!
Mark
PS, the Wrike UX is one of the best i've seen.
Mark, thank you for the feedback! We're actually actively discussing potential improvements to the whole resource allocation experience, so your comment is very timely. Thanks for taking the time to share your insight! Also really glad to hear you're enjoying the UX, I'll ping the team to let them know that ;)
Hi Anastasia,
Thank you for replying to my question. I am glad to hear you are looking at improving resource allocation. I look forward to seeing those improvements baked into the product, as I am very keen on Wrike, but am somewhat frustrated by the inability to see planned/allocated hours in the interface and your built-in visualizations. Please permit me to add some addition unsolicited comments for you to consider.
First, I think you need to shift the focus of the analytics away from reporting/visualizing # of tasks to hours per task (and cumulative hours). All tasks are not created equal and it is of limited to utility to know how many tasks someone has (no matter what stage the task is in) versus the value of knowing how many hours someones tasks add up to. All of your analytics visualizations are great and very well done, but the value of the information in the work progress table/graph would be orders of magnitude greater if you shifted the focus to hours instead of simply tasks.
Second, on the analytics page your metric for DURATION under statistics in the left rail is basically useless. The value should be the sum of all hours allocated on the project, not the total hours in a work day x days in a project (which is what it appears to be).
You already have the data in the table view, just expose it in the analytics view and now I would have a simple visualization that lets me see burn down as I would have total hours for the project (DURATION) sitting next to expended hours (TRACKED HOURS). If you added a few more metrics we could get a very good picture of capacity and commitment. For example, to see remaining hours on a project give us the difference between TRACKED and DURATION. To see commitment level give us the quotient of hours remaining divided by the product of resources on the project and days left in the project . For example if I had 20 hours of tasks remaining in the project, for which there were 3 people assigned and 10 business days to complete them, my commit level during the next two weeks would be 20/(3 x 80) or 8.33% for that project.
I am really liking Wrike and with some simple enhancements around tracking, visualizing, and reporting hours on tasks, you guys have the best product out there for managing projects. I can't overstate how easy your interface is--and I've spent the last 19 years in the web and software business and have used at least a dozen pm platforms (and built 2 from scratch). You guys have really created the best UX for navigating between different focal points in the pm process. I love how easy it is to switch between Gantt, Kanban, table, and list views on a project and how easy it is to drill down into the individual task and sub tasks. I also like how simple you've made dependencies.
Thanks for creating a really solid product and for engaging on your community board.
Cheers,
Mark
Mark, thank you for the detailed comments! We love hearing your thoughts along with examples, I can't emphasize how helpful this is for our Product Team when they're reading through user feedback here. Always happy to learn more as you continue evaluating Wrike! Let me know if you need any help finding existing related requests on the Community, I'll be happy to link you to different posts for providing feedback around certain features. :)
Anastasia:
Do you have an update on the resource allocation enhancements? I'm in a very similar situation to Mark and second all of his comments. If these enhancements are not in Wrike yet, is there a way to output the data (project, task, owner, hours, and duration) so we can build the report in Excel or another tool?
Thanks,
Marc
Hi Marc, sorry for the delay getting back here. We rolled out a new Wrike Resource add-on for capacity management late last year, did you get a chance to review it? Here's a Blog article about it and some Knowledge Base article. Let me know what you think 👍
https://www.wrike.com/newsroom/wrike-rolls-out-new-tool-for-allocating-resources-and-managing-workloads/
https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010835433-Workload-Charts