Tackle Burnout with Resource Management

It’s no secret that when teams are burned out at work, productivity decreases, errors increase, and engagement levels drop. Not only is this bad for an employee’s health and wellness, but it can also lead to higher turnover rates and hamper innovation and creativity within the team.

There are many ways to tackle burnout, but when it comes to work management, organizations need visibility into both the work being planned AND the resources available to execute.

In this session, Tia Calvert, Product Manager, and Erin Kuchera, Creative Operations Manager, at Mayo Clinic, will share:

  • Why using Planned Hours and Task Assignments in Workfront are key to managing resources
  • How to incorporate time off tracking
  • Examples of how Mayo Clinic uses Analytics and Resource Manager to provide transparency to teams, and plan for new work
Transcript
Hi, I’m Tia and this is my colleague Erin. Thanks for having us today. Erin and I are excited to share with you how our brand creative teams use resource management with the built-in capabilities that Workfront offers. Let’s get started. During our resource management overview today, there are three learning objectives that we hope that you’ll take away. One, why are planned hours and task management key to using resource manager tools? Two, the advantages of your team tracking their PTO in Workfront? And three, examples of how analytics and resource manager tools can work together for transparency and planning for new work? Let’s take a brief look at the creative teams, how we got here today. Once we got through our initial implementation and kickoff, we didn’t start out right away using resource management tools. However, after we started using Workfront and bringing our creative teams together, we realized that we needed more and leadership was asking for more. Our feelings alone weren’t the metric needed to tell the story of staff utilization and burnout. So we started with baby steps. It’s taken us almost two years to get to where we are at right now using Workfront capabilities to look into our staff allocation. Then we had to agree. Agree that we needed more and needed to take steps further and be willing to do it together because this was going to require change management in order to get the data out of Workfront that we really needed. That led to a value add in order to prove that the steps that we were taking by entering the data brought more consistency to how our projects are being done, that we can get better metrics and show that what we’re feeling, which most of the time was burnout, and also wondering why are we doing the work that we’re doing? Entering the information and using the Workfront capabilities has given us metrics for the first time, which is a win in a metrics-driven decision-making organization. Now we can prove it. I’ll hand it over to Erin to walk us through how we use this in more detail day to day with our projects using Resource Manager. Erin? As Tia mentioned, addressing burnout has been one of our top priorities for the last few years. Each year, our annual staff surveys repeatedly showed that staff felt burnt out. Our leadership did not take these survey results lightly, and we began to dig into what was causing our staff to feel this way. We heard people say that they felt like they were being asked to do too much with too tight of deadlines. We also heard staff say that they were feeling overwhelmed by keeping track of all of their projects on their own and that the work we were doing wasn’t being prioritized. We started to look at the tools we were currently using and quickly determined a big step forward would be to find a new project management tool that could help us address some of these concerns. We weren’t naive. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to magically flip a light switch and all of our issues would be resolved by simply getting a new project management tool. We knew this was going to be a journey and take a lot of time to reach our destination. As we began to create our roadmap, we strategically started out small and as we became more comfortable and confident and had successes, we built on those successes and added in additional tools and processes that got us closer and closer to our goal. As we began our journey, the first goal was to create project templates. We spent a lot of time documenting our process and creating project templates and specifically spent time setting up planned hours and task durations in the project templates. Once we had our templates created, when a new project would come in, we’d simply attach one of our project templates, assign the tasks and make the adjustments to those planned hours and task durations as needed. And we were off and running or so we thought. Planned hours and task durations were something that were new to our teams and we knew this would be very uncomfortable for some of our people. We were told things like planned hours will never work. This is a waste of time because it’s just a guesstimate and not accurate. We also heard that people felt like using planned hours and task durations would hinder the creative process. Knowing this was a big change, we had to spend a lot of time getting people to buy in and feel comfortable with planned hours and task durations. The most common concern we heard was that the planned hours and task durations, the numbers felt too low and too fast. We understood where this concern was coming from. In our pre-workfront days, our creatives were juggling between 10 to 20 projects at a time. They were concerned that the volume of work they were used to paired with these new small planned hours and short task durations felt unmanageable and overwhelming. These were valid concerns considering how we had worked in the past and the fact that our project volumes weren’t going to decrease. Part of the switchover to workfront also included new processes for intaking work which would result in less ambiguous requests and more clearly defined projects which led to shorter time needed to complete the requests. We were also going to reduce the number of projects each creative was working on so they could focus on a few projects at a time and get them done faster. The question that came back was how are we going to maintain this volume of work but have fewer projects in our queue at one time? The answer, by utilizing planned hours and task durations. We’ll have a better sense of what our team capacity looks like and be able to make better decisions on who can take on more work and when more work could begin. I’d like to tell you that getting traction on using planned hours and task durations was quick and painless but it was quite the opposite. It took a lot of time to get people to find value in using planned hours and task durations. But we stuck with it and I can confidently say that it was worth the effort so we could begin to utilize resource management tools in workfront. Once we had discovered resource management in workfront we knew this would be instrumental in our goal to reduce burnout and was a big milestone we wanted to reach in our journey. However, without planned hours and task durations, we couldn’t tap into this resource which is why we started with planned hours and task durations. When we started to get compliance on planned hours and task durations it was a very exciting time as we were able to start utilizing resource management. We started by testing out several of the features and discovered that Planner and Workload Balancer were able to help us plan, manage, and better understand our capacity. We used Planner in several different ways. One way is to show our leadership what the current capacity is and what we’re predicting for the capacity in the future. I like Planner because it’s a quick read and the graphing feature generates that visual representation of the availability percentage along with the potential for over and under allocation of an individual or specific team. In this example, you can see the data for me and Tia. The light teal color shows the available hours for the two of us for the week shown and that darker teal shows the number of planned hours for both of us in those timeframes. In the green box, you can see that Tia had zero hours of availability for the week of July 2nd through the 8th as she was out of the office at that time. In the yellow boxes, you can see Workfront alerting us that with the planned hours I have been assigned to for that specific week, I’m over allocated by about four and a half hours. The red numbers are that visual cue for me and the project managers that we have over allocated someone. If we see numbers in red consistently, that’s a signal to adjust our workload and volume to avoid burnout. In this example, we can see in the orange box that Tia has some available hours left in this particular week. So in order to resolve my over allocated hours and avoid creating a potential burnout situation, we have a couple of options. One, we could see if Tia could pick up some of that work or two, we can adjust the project tasks to extend the due dates to solve for my over allocation. If this is our only option, I would work with our account managers so that they know which projects were adjusted and will need more time so that the account managers can convey that message to our requesters. We can also see that there’s a relatively small number of hours available for Tia and I in the weeks of July 9th and the 16th. With the planner tool and this information, I can alert our account managers and the leadership that our resources are going to be limited during these two weeks and ask our account team to do what they can to either hold off on submitting new work or let our requesters know that new work isn’t going to start until the week of the 24th. Some of my other favorite features of planner is the ability to export the data to share capacity with your organization’s leadership. And you can also generate a link for someone to review planner if you need to share it with them quickly. The other way we use planner is for project managers to see availability and capacity at a very high level by person or team. Here I’ve taken a screenshot of my data to demonstrate some of the information I utilize as a project manager. The three areas I focus on are available hours, planned hours, and the difference columns. For me, I like to see available hours so I can make an assessment on if we have capacity, what kinds of projects we might have capacity for. If the difference column, if that number is high for the upcoming weeks, I would conclude we have capacity for a larger project. If that difference number is low, I would hold off on agreeing to a large project until I see that number drop and be consistently low for the upcoming weeks ahead. If that difference number is small but consistent, I would look for some smaller projects that we could work into the schedule. I like to share this information with my account managers since the account managers are the one meeting with our requesters. This information can help them set expectations with our requesters on when design work might be able to begin. If there’s an over allocation of hours, the numbers in the difference column will be red to indicate the over allocation and is what triggers me to investigate to see if there’s anything I can do to avoid that number being read. If there are numbers that are staying in the red for week after week, it’s my signal to note to our leadership that we’re approaching a potential burnout situation if we don’t adjust the volume of work. If and when I start to see those numbers get read and stay consistently read, I’ll move over to Workload Balancer. This is one of my favorite features in resource management. For me, I would say I spend about 50% of my time utilizing this feature. What I like about Workload Balancer is you can see the capacity at a high level and it’s broken out by day and week. For me, I like to have my settings set between 6 to 12 weeks at a time and I like to have the information shown as hours for each day of the week. One of my other favorite features in Workload Balancer is you can see the data at a high level, but you can also start to drill down and get more granular in the data you want to see. By clicking on the chevrons shown here in the green boxes next to the person’s name, you can drill down and see the projects that person is assigned to. And in the orange boxes, we can start to see how tasks stack up between multiple people on a project. For this example, you can see the tasks that Tia and I have been assigned to for demo project one and when each of us will be working on a task for that specific project. From there, you can get even more granular by once again clicking on the chevrons next to the project name shown in the green boxes here. To see the individual tasks with their task durations and planned hours split up evenly in that task duration timeframe. This is where I spend a lot of my time manipulating these hours to see if we can get the work done in the timeframes we’ve planned. Typically, I try to schedule about six hours of work per person per day, knowing there are variables like meetings and lunchtime and breaks throughout the day that we don’t account for in work front tasks. You’ll notice that there are two weeks coming up in the orange box that my planned hours are a bit high. And then at the end of the week of the 17th, things start to lighten up. What I like to do is I like to see if I can move some of those planned hours around within Workload Balancer to see if I can get closer to about six hours of planned work per day. Or if I can’t, I may need to adjust the task duration or planned hours to get closer to the goal of six hours of assigned work per day. For this example, the first place I would start would be in demo project two. In theory, I can shift some of those hours to the end of the week of the 17th and into the week of the 24th. So let’s take a look and see if we can get closer to that goal of six hours of planned work per day. By clicking on the chevron in the green boxes next to the project name for both demo project one and demo project two, now we can start to see the tasks on both projects, those tasks durations and the planned hours per task. The first task I want to adjust is in the hours on demo project two in the project brief and document create collection task. I’m going to click on the dark blue hours, delete the hours out for Monday the 17th, and then redistribute those hours into the other two days and click the blue checkmark when I’m done editing those hours. I also moved some of the hours in demo project one on the task called setup and planning, and you can start to see the total planned hours in the green box for each day, start to change the week of the 17th and get a little bit more balanced earlier in the week, and gets me closer to that approximately six hours of planned work. As you can see at the end of the week, I could make a note that my capacity has lightened up and review any projects waiting to start and potentially add one of those in as a potential project to start on the 20th or later. The week of the 10th is still looking a bit overloaded, so my options are one, can we adjust the project duration or a specific task in that project to get more time? Or two, if there’s a hard deadline on this project, can we bring in help from someone else to help lighten the load? Most times in our world, this isn’t a possibility, so we have to reduce the amount of time we spend on that project in order to get it done and hit that requested deadline. For that, we would need to go into the project and reduce the planned hours. So I went in and I adjusted the hours on the specific project, and now we can start to see those totals get closer to about six hours of planned work. I find a lot of value in Workload Balancer because I like the ability to see at a high level how the projects we’re working on start to stack up with one another, and it also gives us the information to determine when we could kick off a new project and who would be available to work on a new project. In this example, you can see at the end of the week of the 17th, as I’ve mentioned, my capacity starts to lighten up, so as a project manager, I can look at what projects are ready and determine which project we could begin work on. Now, when I started showing this feature to the creative staff and the project management staff, I got a lot of questions and concerns. From the creatives, I got, wait, are you expecting me to plan my day around the hours you’ve allocated on each task per day? My answer is no, absolutely not, but this was my time to reinforce the importance of planned hours and task durations on the project level and remind them if they go significantly over or under those planned hours to let their project managers know so we can adjust them on the project level and keep the Workload Balancer accurate. The concern I got from project managers was, do you really expect me to go in here daily and adjust these numbers? This feels like too much work. And my answer was yes. This is how we can determine what our current capacity looks like, and if your teams are in the red, that means we’ve overplanned work for them and we’re potentially leading to burnout, which is what we’re trying to prevent. The good news is the more we started using this tool, the less time we spent manipulating those hours because we could make better decisions on when we can start new work and who could take on more work. Another feature of Workload Balancer that I like is the ability to see when people are planning to be out of the office or what holidays are approaching. If we start to see a lot of people planning to be out, we can share that information with our account team that we’re going to have less creative resources available and keep that in mind when they’re intaking new work and help us set expectations with our requesters. As you can see here, the week of 4th of July, Tia and I had both time off that week, and you can see how Workload Balancer indicates that time off. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Tia to talk more about PTO and schedules. Thank you, Erin. Appreciate it. That was great. So we really, really try to strive for some semblance of a work-life balance. So we wanted to take into account when people and staff are out of the office. We didn’t take too long for staff to adopt this new practice. It was fairly easy. By doing so, we can quickly and easily show in Workload Balancer, as you saw in some of Erin’s examples, the time off section with the little airplane, when a person is going to be out. That might have an impact on allocation on projects that that particular staff member is part of. We also made a very conscious decision to consider time off in our project templates. This way, it takes the task due dates automatically into account for time away on those project timelines and can help recalculate those. Our project managers manage that timeline and the resources. So these two play together really well in being able to see this together. As you can see in this example, once a staff member enters their PTO from their profile on their time off tab, that pulls into the Workload Balancer. With the way that our group works, our project managers can easily make whatever adjustments they need to when they have it set to the day setting or four week view setting, or as Erin said, she likes six to 12 weeks in order to do that future forecasting. This allows our project managers to plan ahead as well, make any adjustments that they need to during team meetings or stand ups. Also from Workload Balancer, you can easily change those assignments in real time across multiple projects without having to click into each project separately, which is also a huge time saver. Now we’ll take a look at how our project data inputs with metrics from analytics tool and also how the data from the resource manager help us make decisions to tell our story on project work with real time staff allocation. By filtering to our different creative teams to pull in all of that work and be able to see that quickly and easily, the plus or minus percent tells an interesting story and each group is unique to what the story is. For us, when we see here in this example that tasks per project are down, but project duration is down, this seems really great, except that we also see that we completed less projects on time last quarter. Knowing this, we can evaluate whatever situations may have been happening in that quarter and what impact they may have had and then make adjustments accordingly. The number of projects also completed validates that we did a lot of work. We felt it and the metrics proved it. And so maybe next time we think about bringing in agency resources to offset the internal staff allocation, because we can’t always do everything in a pinch when customers come forward, especially with last minute work or when there’s a scope and change to the work. Also for annual recurring work, you know, what are those lessons learned? Should we have outsourced? Do we need to back up our timelines on our project templates so that we can make adjustments for the future? We also like to filter our creative teams in this planter tree view. So sometimes not all of the really big projects with a lot of planned hours are sucking up most of the time. It can be those little projects that suck up most of the time. And so that’s another really great way to be able to tell if you should have bring in agency resources where you want to reallocate your internal staff. That way we can get the right people on the right projects at the right time. So I’ll turn it back over to Erin to bring it together for us. As we come to a close, I want to leave you with one of my favorite questions I get after demoing Resource Manager to someone new on our team. And it’s usually a blank stare with a simple question. Why would you do all that? And my answer is because it’s a step in the right direction. Have we solved burnout? No. But have we made steps to make it better? Yes. Utilizing planned hours, task durations, resource management, and the analytics tools and work front have been instrumental in getting us closer to our destination. We have the tools and the data to have greater insight into our work, which helps us narrow in on our pain points and find ways to improve our process and hopefully make our creatives lives easier little by little. I want to thank you for coming along with us on this journey and allowing us to share some of our ways we’ve utilized resource management and analytics and work front. We hope you found a nugget or two that will help you in your journeys to help reduce burnout in your workplaces. Oh, that was so good. Thank you both. I appreciate how you’re leveraging both of the resource management tools for different things. It’s not a one size fits all. That’s really smart. And I loved, loved the example. So we have so many questions. I think we might have more questions than we’ve ever had in one of these sessions. So I’m going to get right to it. My first question, Tia, I’m going to go to you. How do you suggest handling change management in regard to evolving work front processes? Sure. Great question. And thanks for having us. Change management is always a huge topic, and I think it can vary from organization to organization and depending on how many people you need to communicate to. And what are you communicating? How big is the change? How many people is it affecting? But I find that like a good communication plan is really important. Also, support from leadership is critical because it’s hard to have change if leadership’s not on board. If they’re not saying the same things, I’ve also found that repeating messaging is also really a good idea and also doing it over time as best as you can. And if you can do it in phases, that’s also a good idea for change management, especially if it’s a really big change. As humans, big changes tend to be difficult. So if you can do it little by little, that’s really good. Or if you can implement changes where it’s somebody else’s idea or it feels like somebody else’s idea, that’s also really good too because there’s going to be a lot better buy-in. I love that. I like the idea too of the kind of the repeating. Sometimes it doesn’t always stick the first time, but kind of reiterating again and again the value. Erin, next question I’m going to go to you. We have a question from Matt. Also around process and changes, how often do you reevaluate your organization’s processes? What does that audit process look like? Yeah, I would say we kind of have a different varying scale when we look at things. We have a weekly touch point and if we hear the same kinds of pain points week after week after week, we might speed up our process and be like, you know what, this isn’t working. But if we hear it right away, we do like to kind of stop. We’ve only been at this for two weeks. Let’s give it some more time, keep track of what’s causing you the pain points. But I would say we have our weekly touch point. If we’re hearing things frequently, we will address our processes sooner. So maybe it’s quarterly, maybe it’s monthly, maybe it is corresponding to if we have a big change coming down from our organizational level. We just kind of try to keep a pulse on it and then really evaluate is this something that we need to address sooner than we’ve planned or can we kind of wait and just really see how it plays out. It’s one of those things where it’s like, it depends. There isn’t really a set time to say you must look at your processes once a week or once a month. So it really does depend. This question is from Kristen, another Kristen, not for me. It says some projects come in through our request queues, but we also have a large number of annual planning projects that are uploaded to Workfront at the same time. What’s the best way to tackle assignments and resourcing capacity when you’re working with a large volume of projects? You want me to take this one to you? Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, so we do prioritize. We really look at different levels of projects and what they mean. If they are institutional level projects, meaning it’s coming from high up in leadership, we definitely start planning those first, get those in our system first, and then we’ll start to slate in those smaller ones. But we do have kind of a scorecard or how do we kind of determine the level of the project and make sure that we’re hitting those institutional priorities that may be a department level priorities than division level priorities. So it’s just really about prioritizing your projects, getting those big ones in the system first so you really understand how those are going to affect your timelines and then start to slate in those little ones along the way. I love the idea of a scorecard. That actually reminds me, there’s another customer that had been talking recently on Community about prioritizing their projects. They also had built kind of a custom scorecard. We might have to spin up a follow up discussion thread on Community about that. It seems like a great idea. So here’s a really, it’s a really big question. And again, it’s going to be another one of those. It depends, but I think it’s a good one. It’s a really big question. And again, it’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. We try to pull in people from the creative side, from the ops side, from the account side, just so we could really understand their point of view and make sure we were having them come, kind of come along with us on those changes. So we were taking into account what did they think. We kind of came to some consensus on what we thought was a good starting point. And then every time we attach those templates, that’s just our starting point. If there are projects that we know are going to take longer, we have certain requesters that maybe it’s like they just want to get it in the system, but we know that in the initiation phase is going to take longer, we can adjust those planned hours and task durations to match what we know about the certain projects. But it’s just a good starting point, and I would recommend getting a cross-functional team to start to pull all that information and get that kind of buy-in right off the bat. Just one more extra thought on that. You know, when we implement new groups and teams into Workfront, people get really skittish on this and they don’t want to commit. So just remember to start somewhere because we’ve gotten in like a couple weeks after an implementation, maybe they started using their project template and five days was way too long or three days wasn’t long enough. And so making that adjustment then at the base of the project template will also help in the future. And so you’re not stuck with what you maybe first decided, but it’s always good to decide so that you can measure. You’ve got to have a baseline. Oh, go ahead, Erin. I think we kind of have the mentality of we like to fail fast. So we like to try something and if it’s not working, we like to fail fast. And we don’t kind of take it as a failure, we take it as a learning. So like Tia said, if five days was too long, let’s change it. Let’s see how that affects kind of our timelines and make that change and feel comfortable and confident that if that still isn’t right, we can go back and tweak it as we need to. Well, it comes back to the process, right? When we talked about in the last question about how often do you update your processes? And this is something where you say, man, if every time we’re going in and editing these durations on every project, maybe we just need to change that in the bigger process. And so it’s always a living, breathing thing. Next question is from Lindsay, and this is a great one, and it’s talking about variable availability. Say that 10 times fast. How do you accommodate variable availability over time? For example, if you have contractors who offer availability by quarter, are you able to assess that capacity inside of Workfront? Yeah, so all of our freelancers are in Workfront. So what we do is we have them use that PTO piece that we talked about. So if they’re available, you know, their calendar stays open. But if they are going to be not available, or they have certain days that they’re not working, have them put PTO, it’s technically not paid time off, but it helps us in the resource manager know in our freelancer pool who’s available, and maybe we can kind of plan like, well, this one’s going to be offered this time, this one’s off this time. You know, it helps us find that sweet spot of who can take on a project from our freelancer pool by utilizing PTO and Workfront, that calendar. That’s really smart. This is a similar question, and you may or may not use a similar process, but outside of time off, how do you account for time that a resource is unavailable for project work? For example, they’re in meetings, or they’re otherwise unavailable? Yeah, so we don’t have like a task set up just for meetings to kind of help budget meetings. That’s kind of where we stick to that six hour sweet spot that we talked about of trying to plan about six hours, knowing that some days are more meeting heavy, some days aren’t. Six hours of planned time seems to be about the right level for us that we’ve determined, just so we can account for those meeting times. And then we always have that option if it’s, you know, we had an in person retreat a week ago, so we had to really make sure to plan that that week there was zero availability. Nobody was doing the work. We were all meeting in person, so we had to use the previous weeks above that to make sure can we get things done, or do we need to like, you know, move things into the following weeks? We do have one of our teams that works in tandem from us. And one of the decisions that they made was to actually change the FTE allocation on their team’s profile. Instead of it being one, I think they did it like point seven to address kind of what you’re talking about because we aren’t all working eight hours a day. Or it’s intermittent, right, you know, during a work day. So that was one thing that they did to really drill into that a bit more tightly than our creative teams flexed that a little bit more. That’s a great idea. And it’s also a good reminder that every team is different. And again, it’s not it’s not necessarily a one size fits all. Another question here. This is from Lindsay. What is your resource planning look like for longer term? Your current model strikes me as short term, more reactive, which has a time and a place, but we’re struggling to get work front to help us for long term planning. Yeah, I would say for long term projects, we’d like to phase them just to make sure we’re hitting certain dates and milestones. So we have a project that it’s going to take us a year and a half to complete. So we know that. So knowing that there’s going to be a lot of variables because we can’t, you know, it’s kind of a waterfall effect like if we don’t get phase one right, then phase two is already off the rails so we definitely do a phased approach in more of our longer term projects just so we can make sure we can understand and let make you know learn from our phase one phase one didn’t go according to plan do we need to have more time for phase two, things like that so we try to really phase our long term projects, so that it’s not one big thing eating up resources and then we’re not over allocating under allocating based on like what we think is going to happen in six months, we really try to stick to the month at a time and see how we’re doing so we can make adjustments quickly. Yeah. Tia this one is for you I’ve been asking Aaron a lot of questions of you. Can you talk about people analytics and your decisions with those metrics. Yeah, so when you, when you do that we tend to filter by our teams, so that we can see what the people capacity is like. And I think it just helps us forecast, where, where we budgeted right now with ours, and the people planned hours against all the projects that are in flight. And sometimes the numbers are a little surprising like, do we really have that many hours or that’s a little out of hours. And so it just helps you make decisions. Each, each organization has to make their own decisions based on how their team’s working but you know where the hours going. What teams have big chunks of ours. We do resources across our teams so maybe we can swap some people out. Maybe we need to make decisions about bringing an agency partners to help supplement the work. We can take some of our key resources off smaller projects, but the Mon bigger projects, that kind of thing. So it’s just this balancing act constantly looking at the data. I like looking at the data so I think that’s fun. Some people are like, they don’t want to, they don’t care about that just tell me what I should be doing but it’s, it’s really helpful just to kind of get that big picture and then start trying to make some informed decisions. Fantastic. Aaron back to you for this question. This is from Andrea. And the question is how has your team leverage the resource budgeting within the business care of projects, and are the planned hours and duration and your templates more focused on phases and milestones or the task level. I would say we’re definitely in more phases and milestones. We do break it out by like initiation phase planning phases execution phase. So I would say we’re definitely in that more phased approach. You know, as one of the questions was this feels very reactive a lot of the work we do is very reactive we can plan as best we can. But there’s always going to be those hot projects that need to slide in. So using that phase approach helps us with those longer projects we can slide in those tiny little hot potatoes we call them in the mix. So I would say definitely we’re in the more phases and milestones approach. I love the hot potatoes. This one Aaron this might be for you again. And tell me if it’s too in the weeds we can always follow up with this on experience league but this one’s from Kyle and Kyle asks, can you pull a report of planned versus actual per resource regardless of project for example if someone is planned for 40 hours, but input 60 hours for that timeframe. I’m going to go with probably a report to you might lean on you a little bit for that one too. Yeah, and if you want that to be about as accurate as possible. About as accurate as you can possibly get log your time that the only way you’re really going to get good actual hours is when staff are logging their time. Otherwise, it’s a little squishy and you ask a lot it can be based on feelings but if you want to get the amount of time people are actually spending. They need to log their time. I think we have time for one more question and I’m going to ask this one of you both, and it is, what’s next when you think about, you know, resource management if you could wave a magic wand and say the next year what I’d love to do or try or change. What’s next for you guys. Oh man, that’s a good question. Yeah. I think just synchronicity across the different creative teams we have creative pockets all over. We have an enterprise system in our organization, and one of the things that we’re really thinking about is resource allocation, how we bridge from start to finish soup to nuts in workflows, even though you might not actually be in the same department or in the same group structurally. So those are some of the bigger like enterprise things that we’re tackling right now is connecting workflows, getting out of our silos and doing more end to end of that project work, so that we can really see what resources are actually being used, whether you’re creative, whether you’re in content, whether you’re in production services, whether you’re an editor, it shouldn’t matter, we should be able to see all of these from end to end. That’s amazing. There’s, there’s never a shortage of kind of what’s next so it’s good to hear how you guys are thinking about it and I genuinely hate to do it because there are still so many questions I wish you could see there’s so many questions still coming in but that is all the time we have with Tia and Erin. Thank you all so much for your questions. Thank you, Tia and Erin for joining us. A reminder to our audience that I know that there’s more questions. If you want to ask them directly, please visit Experience League so we have started a follow up thread for all of our Grow Track presenters. There’s also one for our Learn Track as well if you’re jumping back and forth where you can keep that conversation going.
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