Proove the team need to hire more people
Hello everyone!
I'm a Wrike enthusiast, even though I'm a free user. Who know one day I'll have a paid account! 😀
I'm writing to ask for strategies to keep track of work not done in order to justify my supervisors/coordinators/managers that our team need more people to get the work done.
I thought about planning the hole week of tasks and at the end of each week find what couldn't be done or searching for tasks that appeared without planning.
What do you think about? Doyou have another suggestions?
Best,
Eduardo Ellery
Hi Eduardo,
I can think of a few options for this, but I think most of them require paid versions of Wrike.
Do you have the Workload view in your workspace? That view stacks all of your tasks and if they add up to be more than 8 hours, it will highlight the day in orange. That means you have too much work to get done in that day.
I find this feature to be pretty useless, however. You'll see in my workload view below that every single day is highlighted orange. That's because this view doesn't have the functionality to disperse effort over multiple days. For example, if a task's duration is 4 days (I have 4 days to complete it) but it should only take me 2 hours total, the workload view thinks it takes that full four days, instead of dispersing those 2 hours among 4 days (30 minutes per day).
If you typically don't span your tasks over multiple days, workload view could work for you as long as you set the duration in hours when you set the due date.
Wrike came out with a new feature that does what I described though--you just have to pay extra for it. It's called Wrike Resource. Here's some info about that: https://www.wrike.com/add-on-wrike-resource/
Currently, the workload view is useless to us and we're not ready to pay for Wrike Resource. We feel that use a tool like this properly, we need to be as accurate as possible about how much time different tasks and projects will take.
We can estimate that a postcard design tasks 4 hours, but unless we are actually tracking our time, that number is just a guess. We're not doing any time tracking in Wrike either.
With all of that said, we have discussed the possibility of using Wrike to justify more positions in our department. We decided that it would be helpful to breakdown the number of tasks per team member vs. the number of tasks that were actually completed. It might also be helpful to look at how many of your tasks have been pushed back time and time again.
As far as I know, there are no reporting tools in Wrike to do this, so it would be a good idea to check this each week.
Another way to see what tasks have been pushed back is by using Snapshots in the Gantt Chart view. You can pull a snapshot of the project as it appeared on a certain date, then compare it to the current project. I think Gantt Charts are a paid feature as well, though.
I hope my input helps some. Best of luck!
Hi Eduardo,
Our team uses Wrike to track our time after each project. We also use custom fields on tasks called task category to count the type of requests we get. So for instance, a brochure request took 10hr and there were 5 of them that means our designer spent 50hrs on brochures alone. These tasks are sorted into the different lines of businesses so we then know how much time and on what types of tasks we are spending time on.
This is always a tough subject.
Good luck to you!
Hi Eduardo,
Our approach is similar to Kerry-Ann's. We also use time tracking. Each task is assigned to a person or people and when they work on a task, they enter their time. You can then run a timelog report on everyone and see how much time they worked on projects in Wrike during a given period.