Create and mange job roles

Transcript

Understanding who has the skill set needed to get certain types of work done is fundamental whether you’re using Workfront or not, because the work will take longer to assign and complete if you don’t know who can design a website or properly connect an expansion valve. This is where Job Roles in Workfront can help in making sure the right people get assigned to the right work. Now Job Roles are not required to create or import users into Workfront. However, they are influential in the scheduling and management of your resources. So what are they? In Workfront, a Job role represents a functional capacity or a skill set a user possesses. They can be as general or as specific as your organization needs them to be, but should not be confused with job titles. For example, in an organization you’ll see Senior Designer, Junior Designer, and Associate Designer. Those distinctions are helpful when thinking about who reports to whom and who should approve what. However, all three have the capacity to design, meaning any one of them could be assigned to design campaign graphics, a website banner, infographic, etc. So in Workfront, you can simply create a Job role named Designer and associate it with all three. In addition, Workfront can narrow down a user list based on Job role whenever a team lead or project manager goes to make an assignment for a work item. But before any of that can be done, we first have to make sure Job roles are created in your instance and that they are associated with users. Job roles are managed by Workfront administrators through the Job role section in the setup area. In this section, you’ll see Job roles that came with Workfront and or created either by yourself or other Workfront administrators. Before creating any new Job roles, it’s always useful to look at what’s there to see if what you need is already listed. However, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can create a Job role. To do that, click the new Job role button and give the Job role a name. Of the fields that show, only name is required. However, filling in other information such as description may be useful for yourself or other admins that come after you. If your organization is tracking financial data in Workfront, fields like cost per hour and bill per hour are also useful. Once done, click Create Job role. The screen will refresh and list the new Job role with the others and is ready to be associated with users in Workfront. Now at this point, the Job role has been created, but until it’s linked to a user, it isn’t doing anything. Meaning when a team lead or project manager goes to make an assignment based on Job role, they won’t see all the users that could be assigned to the work. So you need to make sure to link a user to at least one Job role. To do that, go to the main menu and go to the users area. A list of users appears and can be organized in alphabetical order. As a side note, it’s useful to filter the list to active users so you can focus on individuals currently using Workfront. From that list, check the box next to the user or users you would like to associate with a Job role. Once selected, click the Edit icon. From the Edit user screen, go to the Resource Planning section. Within this area, you’ll find two fields for Job roles, Primary role and Other roles. The Primary role determines what work a user should be doing or be assigned to most of the time. For instance, a user may mainly spend time as a copywriter. Perhaps their Primary role in the organization or on a team. So here in the Primary role field, enter Copywriter. You’ll notice that as you start to type, Workfront automatically lists any role with that word in the title. And from here we can select Copywriter. Once there and saved, whenever a project manager or team lead needs to make an assignment with that Job role, that user shows up as a possible option. Now people often have more than one skill set and although they may focus most of their time in one area, they can still do different things to help a team and the organization either daily or when things are typed. And in this case, it may be that this user can also fill the role of a copy editor or graphic designer. That’s where the Other roles field comes into play. When you enter additional Job roles for a user, you’re indicating that they can be assigned to that type of work as well. Next to each Job role listed, whether Primary or Other, there is a spot for percentage. This indicates the amount of scheduled time that a user should be allocated for each Job role. For example, by default the Primary Job role is set to 100%. That means if the user works 40 hours a week, then all 40 hours should be dedicated to work as a copywriter. But if you switch the Primary to 75% and give the other Job roles their percentages, all equaling 100%, you’re indicating that although the majority of this user’s time should be spent on writing, that some of their time can be allocated for copy editing or creating graphics. This is helpful if you plan on diving into the world of resource management and using Worker1’s resource management tools. However, if you’re not planning on doing that, you can leave the other roles as 0% and still assign them to tasks where needed. With all of that in mind, and once all information has been entered, click Save Changes. By creating and associating Job roles in Workfront, you let your managers, team leads, and users make and get assigned to the right work.