[Status: Not planned] Workload Remaining Effort

One area that I find Wrike to be weak in is the relationship between planned effort and work done to date. There is no tie between how much work we planned to do and how much has been done so far, and thus how much remains. They are completely isolated pieces of data.

 

For example, if we have a task that is 4 weeks (20 working days) in duration, and we assign an effort  of 40 hours of work to be done in that time, the workload will show that the task requires 2 hours per day for the assigned user (basic effort assignment).  If that user doesn’t do anything for the first week, then there are 3 weeks left (15 days) to complete the 40 hours of work; which is fine because they have all 4 weeks to get the work done. However, the workload still shows that the load is 2 hours a day for every day of the duration, including the past days that they did not do anything, and all future days. It is not dynamic, nor does it reflect the difference in planned versus executed effort.

 

The only way to adjust for this is to manually go in and change the effort assignment to Flexible and redistribute the effort day by day. This is tedious and very inefficient when attempting do this for every task, especially long duration tasks.

 

I would love for tasks to have a “remaining effort” that can be used on the workload charts. If we look at the example above, given the user did not do any work the first week, the rest of the duration (3 weeks, 15 days) still has a remaining effort of 40 hours. Now the effort per day for the remainder of the duration is 2.667 hours per day (40 hours of effort over 15 working days). There is no way to show this in Wrike.

 

Let’s take it a step further and say that the user had other work to do and was only able to perform 4 hours of work on this task until the last week of the duration. Now they have to focus heavily on this task to get it done in time, with a remaining effort 36 hours, 7.2 hours per day, for the last week of the task (40 hours of effort - 4 hours worked to date, leaves 36 hours of effort remaining, spread across the last 5 days is 7.2 hours per day).

 

The workload does not reflect this. It doesn’t take into account how much of the effort has been completed versus how much effort was planned. The workload chart still just shows 2 hours per day throughout. This means that when I am planning additional work, it appears that this user is only at 25% capacity, when in reality he is now at 90% capacity because of this one task for that week.

 

I want to be able to have the option in the Workload view to show the chart based on remaining effort instead of planned effort. Otherwise, the workload view is only as good as the initially planned effort and does not show the reality of how busy everyone actually is at any given time. To truly see the current workload on users, Wrike needs to base it on remaining effort across the duration and if the tasks are completed already or are still active.

 

I have used another company’s PM platform in the past that based the workload dynamically on how much work remained to be done. So as the work was performed, the remaining workload either went up or down depending on the reality of how much effort remained. This painted a more accurate picture of users’ workload. And the “health” of the task was based on how far off target that workload was.

 

I think it would not be difficult to have this option in Wrike. It is simply a calculated data field of effort minus time spent as the basis for the workload chart instead of just the planned effort. The chart would be rendered based on one field versus the other. No change to the rendering engine, just the data fields fed to it. A simple display option could allow the choice of rendering based on planned effort or remaining effort. This would be a huge enhancement to the usability of the workload view.

 

I have created reports and custom fields in Table view to try to replicate this information, but you can’t create the visual aspect of the Workload view. This needs to be an option of the Workload view and not a columnar report to be useful.

 

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Hugh

Hi Jason Pontius, thank you for this post! This suggestion has been passed on to the Product team. Providing a detailed use case such as this is really helpful for the team when they're having conversations about requests from the Community.

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Jason described this issue really well. The absence of remaining effort in workload chart makes ongoing planning a really cumbersome process. 

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Has this been put into a formal request? Would love to upvote it.

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Hugh

 
Product Feedback posts from the Community act as formal requests for our Product team. All of the suggestions are collected and used by the team while putting together their roadmap, so be sure to add your vote to this post! You can read more about what happens with Product Feedback posts in this Community article.
 
Hope this helped! If you need anything else, let me know.
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100% agree with Jason.

We try at the moment to implement Wrike as planning tool and not only as task management. And this is for sure a big drawback compared to other tools.

 

mdr

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In our company would like to implement a planning (workload) base on remainig effort. Case described by Jason is the same what we would like to implement. 

mdr

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Hey everyone, thanks a lot for your continued support here!

This suggestion is on the team's radar and all your feedback is passed to the Product team. Once I have an update from them, I'll make sure to let you know! 

mdr

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Thanks so much. This update would be very useful for our teams.

mdr

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Our team also needs the above link between planned hours verses hours completed which will allow us to better determine when tasks are expected to be completed (assumes planned effort to completed is correct). Please add this feature as I know it will make it easier to determine when tasks not started on time are in jeopardy of not being completed on time not only by the manager but by the employee. 

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Hi everyone! I've changed the status here as the team is currently researching this suggestion and have plans to work on it next year 🎉 Thank you so much for your feedback here! I'll keep you posted 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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This really seems like an oversight as the whole Workload/Resource add on, which is very expensive, is missing this very basic concept of "remaining estimate" which should update after time is tracked.  This is absolutely essential in the software development use case when trying to plan epics, etc. I think "product" should simple take Jason Pontius 's post as a spec, and simply build this.  Jason is right, there are other tools that handle this on the market, and with all I am considering investing in Resource, it sounds like it could be a real pain I'm about to set myself up for with updating those allocations manually to keep my workload accurate.

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Al Sape  You are correct that manually trying to keep remaining workload accurate is a serious pain. We gave up on that and try to use other means of understanding where tasks really are and what the remaining effort looks like. 

Thanks for your support on this notion. I haven't seen any movement or comment here for 6 months now.

Wrike needs to address this as other tools have done. 

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Hi again, everyone!

I've checked with our Product team and got an update from them - unfortunately, after this suggestion's evaluation during the research phase, it was not prioritized for upcoming development work. We understand that this is disappointing news for you, but please rest assured that we will keep this topic on the team's radar and we'll continue to pass on your feedback to them. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Once again this is Wrike not prioritizing fundamental features of a project management platform that their competitors provide. It's not a request for an odd, case-specific feature. This is basic, fundamental information needed in the platform to show the real effort needed to complete a task. There continues to be a core gap in architecture between planned effort and actual effort in Wrike.

Very disappointing and frustrating that it seems like the most fundamental improvements get "not at this time" for years while we get things like new icons for spaces. I'd much rather have real data then icons of any kind. 

 

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Totally agree with Jason comment. Disappointing that this is not a priority

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I'm sorry I had to disappoint you here Jason Pontius, Emilie Graveline. This feedback will remain on the team's radar and if we have any updates on the remaining effort in the future, we'll make sure to let you know.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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I think this is very important as well.  Currently I use a custom field system to get the "time remaining", but I cannot get a report that shows everything I need in one report.

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Thank you for supporting this suggestion Jennifer Breitbach! I'm passing your feedback to the Product team and I'll let you know if there's an update or status change here. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Following the feeling of other  comments ... this should be a basic feature in a project managent tool. I'm evaluating it, for the use in my Department, and I have to say that this disappointing ...

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Hi Xavier Tarrús, thanks a lot for reaching out and sharing your feedback! 

I have asked the team for an update on this suggestion - they are still not planning to work on it at the moment, and we understand that's not the news that you wanted to hear. We will continue to pass on your interest here, please rest assured that your feedback helps the team a lot even if they can't act upon it yet.  

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Adding another request for this feature - I have to echo the disappointment of others; this really is an obvious core feature to have - workload is otherwise just a theoretical number at best. Time remaining just feels like a no-brainer to have available?!

Additionally, providing this field would solve the problems many of us have, which is having to use a custom field to calculate 'remaining time', and you can hardly do any proper reporting or automation without this being a normal field.
Example, having an automated reminder sent out that if remaining time is < 10 hours, to trigger an automated alert / comments.

I also do not understand that something as crucial as this is not given more attention, rather than some new shiny buttons added.

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Fleur Komen  Thank you for chiming in on this topic. I completely agree with your feedback and wish that Wrike would do something about this. I have posted about this for multiple years, walked Wrike team members through it on the phone, and even provided a copy of my spreadsheet that I use to chart resource impact based on exported data from Wrike, and have gotten zero traction on any plans to provide these core features.

Let's all remind Wrike that their competitors have been doing this for quite a while. In fact, we originally chose another platform partly due to this. Unfortunately, we ran into other limitations on that platform that didn't work for us and had to come back to Wrike, even if it meant not having this feature. 

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Thanks a lot for your continuous feedback here, it's all been passed to the team now. I don't have an update from the team at the moment, but if there's any news in the future, I'll definitely let you know. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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I would like to reiterate the need for this type of workload balancing/reporting.  While I have enjoyed many elements of Wrike, I just left a meeting where it has been proposed we consider changing to another tool that can better satisfy this requirement.  

Hoping the product is taking this feedback seriously and moving it up the priority list.

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Cansu

Hi Tim MacEachern, thank you for sharing your thoughts and concerns. Please rest assured that we take your feedback seriously and we are very thankful to you for providing it. I've checked with your Wrike Representative and your account has a few meetings arranged with the team, please do let know your account owner if you haven't already all your feedback and needs so our team can assist you the best way they can. 

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I have spent time on the phone with Wrike Representatives in the past, but it has become a waste of my time since nothing ever happens. Yet again, we recently received a UI update with new styles, but no movement on core features that are lacking. Wrike development priorities are off target.

This thread has been active for several years, and it was reported in 2020 that the dev team would be working on this in the coming year (2021). Then we are told in 2021, "nope, just kidding, not happening".  

Everyone on this thread has voiced their similar position on this topic and we are ignored year after year, so I don't really see this as Wrike taking our feedback seriously. They'd rather create new views and new styles rather than build actual functionality.

 

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Cansu

Hi Jason Pontius, thank you for the feedback that you’ve been providing us with here and through additional channels. We appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback and thoughts. 

We have recently announced during Collaborate more than five core features are planned and currently being in either labs or development, you can find the full list here. We want to ensure that we focus on feature releases that will have the biggest impact for the most users, we do need to prioritize and that is why this is not on the roadmap at this time.

If you’d like, I can also notify your account team of your concerns and have them reach out to you to discuss. Please let me know if you would like for me to arrange this.

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@..., thank you for the feedback.

I can't help but to point out that we are hearing the same story, which is why users are so negative on this topic.  Your comments, "we do need to prioritize and that is why this is not on the roadmap at this time". "Not at this time" has been the same story for multiple years, so when is the time to address these items? When will it ever make it on the roadmap? 

 

And the list of features planned include a number of interface enhancements. We have all made it very clear that we'd rather see core functionality improve than the style of the interface. Eye candy is not a core feature. I know that these are "nice", and we appreciate them, but it makes no sense that these are higher priority than missing core functionality. There are several major holes in Wrike's feature set that have existed, and have been commented on by users, for at least 3 to 5 years. That's just way too long to address missing functions that the competitors have had for longer time than that. 

 

Thank you.

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I more than aggree with Jason. This is a core feature that needs to be addressed and would like to understand better your prioritization process. 

Thank you

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One more point to think about: people are saying in our company please leave the GUI as it is. Simple reason: we know now how it works. Every change in GUI means learning new usage of the tool. So their should be a very good reason for this.

Totally agree: better would be to bring new features liek requested here.

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