Ask the Expert - Understanding mix and capacity

Transcript

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second Workfront Wednesday Ask the Experts workshop. We’re seeing a few questions coming into our Q&A about how to access the audio, so let’s start there really quickly. There is no dial-in. Your computer speakers will broadcast the audio. If you’re having trouble seeing the slides, just go ahead and make sure that Flash is enabled in your browser. Hit refresh. If not, go ahead and do that. Hit refresh, and then you should see the slides. If you’re still having difficulty, please go ahead and post a question into the Q&A, and we will get to you as quickly as we can. Today’s workshop, we’re going to focus on leveraging Workfront reporting to understand mix and capacity in your work. It’s important to understand that in the context of today’s workshop, we define mix and capacity as what you’re working on, run work versus change work, and how much total work your organization can handle. These concepts are discussed in detail in our book, Done Right, if you’d like more. We won’t spend a lot of time on them today. But before I introduce our speaker, again, a few more housekeeping items in case you just joined. There is no audio dial-in. The audio is broadcast via your computer speakers, so make sure your computer is not on mute. Make sure Flash is enabled to see the slides. And please refresh if you’ve just had to do those things. Today’s content also assumes that you have completed our advanced reporting courses via Workfront and Stents. If you haven’t done this, that’s OK. Please go ahead and stay and know that you can visit this training afterward. Chuck will begin with a presentation explaining mix to capacity with the goal of helping you understand how to build your own mix and capacity reports in Workfront. Upon conclusion of our presentation, we’ll shift to question and answer via the chat. So make sure you have your chat window handy. And in this time, you’re free to post any reporting question you have, whether it’s related or unrelated to today’s topic. We will answer the questions live on air via the chat window or after the webinar via email, depending on the complexity of the questions and our time.

This recording, along with a transcript of all questions and answers from the session, will be emailed to all who registered and posted on our newly launched reports and dashboards resource page on the Workfront Experience training site. And if you look in your question and answer section, you should see a question from us with a link to today’s Workfront Wednesday Did You Know blog post that takes you to the reports and dashboards resource page. And it also contains information that we will reference during today’s presentation.

And so, again, see the chat window if you need that link. Any other questions? If you’re having trouble in any other way, please post them into the questions and answers, and we will get to them as quickly as I can. And with that, I’d like to introduce our Workfront Senior Learning Program Manager, Chuck Middleton. Chuck, take it away. Okay.

Okay. Thank you.

So I’ll share my screen here.

All right. Well, as was mentioned, let me wait a second. I don’t think my screen is showing yet.

Cara, can you see my screen? Ah, looks like it’s there. Never mind.

All right.

Okay. Well, we had a webinar on velocity reporting back in August. And so this is kind of a follow-on to more about WPI reporting.

So I’ll just kind of jump into this, and I’ll mention a few other things along the way. Now, any questions that you have about the presentation or anything, be sure to put them in the Q&A. I won’t get to them until after the presentation. So this is a little longer than last time, so it might go half an hour or so.

Well, you’ve only got so many resources, and Workfront is here to help you to make sure they’re working on the most important things. So that’s what mix and capacity reporting is all about. So mix is about the projects that you choose to work on, and capacity is about knowing if you have the resources to do them. So we’ll start with mix. So we’ve got a mix report here on the screen.

And I want to emphasize also that these reports that we’re showing are just examples of things that hopefully you can adapt for your own organization, depending on your own needs. Now, we are assuming that you’ve taken the report creation course or have equivalent experience.

And the advanced reporting course is not a requirement for watching this, and we don’t expect you to understand that, although we will show you a few interesting tidbits that you can get there.

If you’re already tracking mix, you probably want to just continue tracking it the way you are and then base your reports on whatever you’re tracking. Now, we’re using a particular way of tracking it here that’s kind of based on what Alex Schutman said in his book Done Right.

And we’ll get into more detail on that in just a minute. The basic thing, though, to start with is when you are creating any report, in order for it to be meaningful and to be valuable to either you or the person who created or you’re creating it for, you need two basic elements. The first element is data. You need to make sure you’re capturing the right data to use in your reports. This includes fields, either native fields that come with Workfront or custom fields that you decided to track, and could also include calculated fields derived from native fields or custom fields. The second element is presentation.

This is about how you’re displaying your data. A brilliant display of irrelevant data is not going to be very good, and a poor display of relevant data may only be a little bit better. So you want to make sure you get the best display that you can for the audience that you’re intending to inform.

The first question we’re asking here in this report is, what do we want to know about the mix of the work that our organization is doing? So Alex, in his book, Done Right, says that these ought to be in two categories, basically run and change, or as we’re going to refer to them here, operational and strategic. And what’s the right mix for your organization? Well, that’s for you to decide. But once you do decide that, you want to have a way to measure if you’re getting the mix that you think is appropriate. So you can create charts to make that easier to see if you’re reaching your goal or if you need to do some work to correct that.

In this report, for instance, you can see right off that our goal is 20% of our efforts spent on strategic work. Put it up there in the title.

The columns here represent the work done by each quarter. They kind of summarize that. So for this quarter, we had mostly operational work, a little bit of strategic work. The gray on top is the amount of work that was strategic, and the orange is the amount of work that was operational.

And you can see that as we kind of went along in our history here. This is a fictional company, of course.

We decided we needed a little bit more strategic work. We overdid it here, kind of got back onto a good track, and now we’re doing pretty well. But this report is helping us to kind of see how we did over time.

So how do we set something like this up? Well, there’s a few assumptions here. One is we decided to do this at a task level. You could do it at a project level or at a task level, whichever works best for you. We decided doing it at a task level kind of just for the purposes of showing things here.

And we decided to determine what percentage of work effort is done in operational versus strategic based on the planned hours that were associated with it.

So that’s also something you could do differently, but planned hours is a very good choice. It’s also something that can help you in capacity planning. It’s a very important part of capacity planning. So that was part of the reason that we made this choice.

And so we decided to define these types of work in a custom field. And I’ll show you that custom field over here.

We created a custom form called WPI task data mix. And we’ve got only one field in here, work type, operational or strategic.

Now, once we’ve got this set up, all we have to do is apply this to every task that we want in our system, basically, and identify it as being operational or strategic. That may sound crazy hard, and it can be. So there’s some shortcuts that you can take to kind of automate this process a little bit. What we did in this example here is we went all the way back to the beginning of 2016 and looked at a whole bunch of tasks and tried to figure out, OK, are these operational or are these strategic? What you can do to help this is something called bulk edits. So if you look at any list report, and I’ll just go over here to this list here, you can see that I’ve got 28 tasks here. And let’s say that I gathered up these tasks because I knew they were all operational. And I had some filters set in my report to do this. Then I can just click on that one checkbox at the very top and select all of the tasks in here. And then this Edit option comes up. So I can click on it. This is what we call Bulk Edit. And I can go down here to Custom Forms, and I could change all of these to operational all at once. So that’s the concept there. So the next thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to go to the next section. And the next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to create a report to help us do this.

So go back to the Reports area.

And we’re going to create a task report here.

And what we’re going to do in the views, we’re going to add a Work Type column.

So this is the custom field that we put in the Task Custom form. And because it’s in a Task Custom form, it shows up here under the task object.

We’ll also add project name.

And let’s add one more thing here. Let’s add the project owner. Now, when we go to add project owner, we run into a little problem. It only gives us the owner ID.

That’s where the builder is not providing what we want, but we’re really close to getting it. So there’s this other thing that we want to talk about a little bit today called Text Mode. Now, Text Mode, I’m going to go ahead and choose this as an option. And then I’ll switch to Text Mode here. This little switch to Text Mode option shows us the code that is created when you do create filters, views, or groupings in the builder, or when you create filter, views, and groupings in other things, like directly in a project list of tasks or something like that.

So this Text Mode is something that you can go in here and look at, and you can even edit it. You should know what you’re doing, though, because how you learn about this is there are a couple of ways. One is you can take the advanced reporting course, which goes into all the detail you need about using Text Mode, or actually quite a bit of it.

It also, there’s a lot of help articles in Workfront that talk about Text Mode. And you can learn some things even beyond what’s in the advanced reporting course with those. So that’s a pretty big investment. And you’re going to put several hours into doing this, and it’s very appropriate if you’re going to be using Text Mode a lot. But if you’re only going to be using it occasionally and you just need it for something as simple as this, well, there’s this other thing called Basic Text Mode. Basic Text Mode is basically Text Mode without all the words that you need to know about it. Basic Text Mode is basically Text Mode without all the work to go learn about everything about it, but just to get something done that you need and somebody to supply you with the information you need to change it. So in this case here, what we want to do is change project owner ID to project name. I’m going to bring this in here so you can see this a little better.

So we’re going to go to the owner object and look for the name. That’s basically what that means.

Pretty easy to do here. I’ll go into value field, put in colon name.

All right.

Now, how did I know how to do that? Well, I took the advanced reporting course. That’s where I learned that. But we do have some blog posts on the Workfront Wednesday Did You Know series about certain things that you can do with Basic Text Mode. And I’ll show you where you can see those. I’ll click it in one place. But there’s several of them now. And actually, one of the reasons we started this is because somebody asked for them. So please put your comments in these and ask for other things that you’d like to know.

Maybe there’s some things that are pretty simple to use in text mode that are pretty common. And that’s where we want to be gathering these up. I think Kara mentioned that we have a new reporting web page. And that’s the place where we gather all this kind of information. And I’ll show you that a little later on.

OK. So now we need to create a filter here. Let’s go into the filters.

And what do we want to see? Let’s see. We don’t want to see anything but working tasks. So what a working task is, is a task is assigned to somebody. They’re going to get the work done. And they can mark it as complete. A parent task, on the other hand, is kind of a child task or complete. Then the other thing about it is it’s going to calculate the planned hours based on adding up all the planned hours of the working tasks. So if we want to get accurate planned hours in here, we don’t want to have things being counted twice. So we’re going to exclude the child tasks. The way we do this is they have something to keep track of here called number of children. If number of children equals 0, it’s a working task.

OK. Another thing we’re going to do here, I’m going to say we only want to see things that have a planned completion date of greater than January 1.

And you’ve got to be careful here. Say greater than first.

If you think of it later, you’ve got to retype this in. All right.

And then there’s the matter of a custom form. Now, if we provide a custom form on here, or if there is a custom form on the task, I mean, that one with the work type in it, then that means we’ve already dealt with it. We’ve already decided if it’s operational or strategic. So for this report, we only want to see ones that don’t have that custom form yet.

So if we’re talking about custom forms, custom forms in the builder are called categories. So we have a category object, and then we have a categories list.

A category refers to the first custom form that’s attached to the task. And categories are all of the ones in the list. All of the custom forms attached to the task, that can be up to 10.

So this is what we want to use. And if we look at this category ID, and we say that we want to see where it’s not equal to WPI task data mix, you might think this would work. Well, it doesn’t work this way.

So I’m bringing it up because this is kind of a path to getting it to work.

This is one of those little tidbits. It’s nice to know. Because when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t tell you what to do. So we’re going to tell you here. There’s another thing you need to use in order to access a list. It’s some more text mode. It’s called an exist statement. And exist statements, let me go over here and show you how we find out about exist statements. There’s a really good help article on this. Like go to help articles.

When I type in, I didn’t spell that right. So it’s still looking.

Looks like it still found it.

OK, this is the article on creating complex text mode filters using exist statements. And they are complex. I’m going to read this little warning here. It’s really important. First, this article requires a thorough understanding of the Workfront API and the text mode reporting interface. You’ll get a really good understanding of the text mode reporting interface in the advanced reporting class. You just barely touch on the API there. So we don’t really get into that much.

So getting a thorough understanding of this is probably out of reach for most of us. So what I’m going to do here, show you another little bit of text mode that’s handy for this. There are some examples in here as well.

What I’m going to show you, there’s not an example in this article.

But that’s the wrong one. I’m so sorry.

Here’s what we’re going to be using. Now, what this is saying is this category ID is the one we want to make sure is not there.

And we’re going to have to have the ID of whatever that is.

I’m going to select all this right now.

Copy it.

Now we’ll go back into our report.

This is the thing we want to exclude. And when I switch to text mode, its ID is going to show up here.

Let me show you a little bit about what this is. You kind of see this is about number of children that we had in there. This is about planned completion date. This is about those categories. And that’s the ID. Now I’m going to paste in what I just copied from the exist example. And it still happens to be the same ID because that’s what I was using. But we just copy it from here and paste it here.

So if it were, you’ll want to keep this example around. As Kara mentioned, there is a Workfront Wednesday blog that came out today already. And it’s got this code in there. So if you want to use it, just remember to replace this ID with the ID of what you want. An easy way to find it is by putting it in the builder and seeing it in text mode.

There’s other ways to find it as well. But this is the simplest one. OK, so now that we’ve got that in there, we think we’re done.

Oh, one more thing I want to do. I want to go and add some prompts.

Now, report prompts are going to be in addition to any filtering that I have here. But I want to add some of these because this can give us some clues or we can use some clues that we know for helping us find operational things. Maybe we have a portfolio full of operational stuff. So maybe we just want to see all the tasks in the portfolio. So we can put in a custom prompt for portfolio ID.

Another, let’s say the task name.

Because we might have named some tasks, like we have the word maintenance in the name, and that might be an operational thing.

Another one, how about the name of the project manager? So maybe certain project managers deal specifically with strategic or operational.

So here we got project owner ID again. But we also are given project owner as its own object here, which is a nice treat. So we can just grab in.

And that’s a good thing because we couldn’t use text mode here in the report settings. It’s only in the filters for using groupings. And then we’ll add one more prompt for people that are assigned to the task.

And so here we’ve got assignment users. There can be many people assigned. So we want to see if a particular user is assigned and put their name in there.

So now we’ll save this. We’ll call this our mix setup report. And here we go. If we just run it, we’ll see. It’s good to do that just to make sure we get everything right. Got the work type there and the project name. Oh, project owner ID. I didn’t change that column heading.

Let me show you how to do that. And then we’ll go to the next one.

And then we’ll go to the next one. And then we’ll go to the next one. And then we’ll go to the next one. And let me show you how to do that.

It’s one more little thing that you can do in text mode.

And it’s for this.

The display name, you can type anything you want in display name.

And that will override the name field here that’s provided.

OK. And when we go back in here, let me just add a prompt. So let’s say that we want to see all the project owner names where they’re equal to.

The project manager that we happen to know has a lot of strategic work that they do. So I’ll run the report. You’ll see all the things where the project owner is Pam.

There’s 200 of these tasks. What I want to do before I click this here, because it’s only going to select things that are showing on this list here. So I want to have all 200 of them showing.

Then I’ll go and select this. I will click on Edit.

Now in this case, we don’t have the custom form in here. So I’ll need to add it.

And we’ll make all these strategic.

All right. Now if we refresh over here, let’s say we took care of all those. Now we can go back.

And we’ll change this to any. And let’s do something here. Let’s say that the name, task name, contains maintenance.

So here we only have a couple. So I could select them all, and I could go back and do a bulk edit.

But I can also just change the work type right here. That’s one of the reasons I put it here. And let’s say that actually I find that one of these is strategic, OK, and the other one is operational. So I can kind of look these over carefully and put the appropriate thing in here. Now notice that these did not have the custom form as part of them. That’s why they showed up in this list. But when I select something that is referenced here, so I can put a reference to work type in the report because work type is a field that the task custom form. When I select something here in the inline edit, it automatically pulls that form in and attaches it to these two tasks. So now if I refresh this, those two tasks are out as well. So I can keep going and going through prompts here until at some point when I’ve got them all, then I won’t have any data showing up at this part of the report. And I’ve still got 800 to go.

OK, so once I do that, I can go back to the report. Then I’ll have something meaningful in my mix report.

It’s like I changed some things here that made a difference. One of the things I want to do now is take a look at this mix report and how this was created.

So we’re going to edit the report, take a look at the filters.

So one of the things here, I only want to look at tasks where the work type has been defined. So the work type is not blank, meaning there is a work type and there’s nothing in it. So I’ll just put those things in with that custom form. Number of children is zero. Yeah, I already said I didn’t want to even put the form on anything that was a parent task. But I could have accidentally done that. So it’s a good idea to have this in the filter here. Same with this planned completion date in here. If I wanted to filter on it, I shouldn’t assume that I just didn’t put the form on those.

OK, the next thing is groupings. Now in the groupings area, I decided to group by planned completion date by quarter and then within that by work type.

And that’s how I was able to do that. And that’s how I was able to make the chart, is that the groupings that you have become the things that you can use in your chart. If I have two groupings, I get to do a group of columns, which allows me to, I could have the columns be side by side, kind of grouped together by the planned completion date again, or stacked in various ways. I chose to stack to 100%.

But I could have just as well tried something else. And in fact, what I’m trying to illustrate is that it’s very easy to try other things.

So create a bunch of reports and try and see which one looks the best and which one really delivers the data in the way that makes most sense to people. Change colors as you need to as well. You can put custom colors in here and you can even change the colors.

You click in this area, you get a whole palette that you can choose from.

So what I’m going to do here, I’m going to avoid changing this because this is the report that I got right. I don’t want to mess it up. So I’m going to cancel out of this.

And I’m going to go in here, report actions, and I’m going to copy this report. So now I’ve got a copy of it. I can go in and edit the copy.

And here I’ll change the bar report and to stacked. Now if I go stacked, I don’t do a percentage. I have the numbers in here are going to be the numbers of planned hours. So it’s going to look a little different, but I’m doing it so I can see and see if I like it better. OK. So that’s a mixed report. Let’s talk about capacities next. Now capacity reports, these are really important. The first thing you need is to know what is the availability of your resources and how are you going to know that. And you’re going to have to know what is the availability of your resources. And how are you going to know that? The best way to get a good sense of their workload is to use planned hours. If you have planned hours on all the tasks that people are assigned to, then you have some estimate of the level of effort they are going to be spending on that or did spend on it in past projects. You can also track actual hours to know exactly what they did spend on it. In the case of planning for the future, looking at your capacity so you can see how much you can get done, you really want to have planned hours in there as accurate as possible for an idea of how busy your people are. So there’s other ways to do it than planned hours, but they’re not nearly as good. So we definitely recommend using planned hours. The next thing you want to know is how long does it really take for us to get things done? Are we always having to replan our projects? This kind of approach is the concept of the work to commit ratio. Are we able to complete work when we first said we would? And how good are we at that? The greater confidence you have in that, that’s going to play into how confident you are. If it looks like you have enough capacity to do something, that you’ll actually get it done in the time that you plan. All these things take practice, of course, to get better at. Reports are a really important element in seeing if you’re moving ahead on that. So the things we want to really focus on right now then, or want to emphasize, is in order to do accurate capacity planning, we want to have a good work to commit ratio. Now, we talked about work to commit ratio in our August webinar. And you can go back and review that. There will be a link to it on the reporting web page some point soon.

And to all of these webinars. Having our current work estimated in tasks with planned hours, and then having all our work in Workfront. If you want to know how much time you have left available to do other things, knowing how busy people are in Workfront is one thing. But if they’re doing a whole bunch of things that are outside of Workfront that aren’t being tracked in Workfront, you really don’t know how much time they have available. So having all of your work in Workfront is a really good idea. Even things that people do, like maybe they spend two hours a day doing random things or keeping up on email, other things that aren’t in other projects, you can create an overhead project and assign them a task that says they’re allocated for two hours a day or how many hours you want. One full day at the beginning of every quarter or something like that, depending on their needs. So that’s how you’re going to get an accurate idea, or the most accurate idea, of how available people are. All right, so the reports for this, these are not reports that you can do as custom reports. There actually is something, so don’t lose hope. I’ll show you a custom report that can be helpful if you’re not using planned hours. But if you’re using planned hours, these are going to be by far the best reports. So you go to the People tab, the Planning subtab, and you’ve got the resource planner here. And here we’re just showing it by a certain team. And we’re showing it view by project. And these are the available hours. These are the planned hours. And how many are available and how many are left, you’ve got a better view by role. By role is how busy are our designers, how available are they. This is calculated by work front based on the number of job roles that you have in the system assigned to people. That’s how users calculate those available hours there. That along with the FTE setting on each of those users. And then you can view by user themselves. And in any of these, you can look and get more details. Like here I can see for Bill Engineer, which projects he’s working on, and which roles there are in these projects. In a view by user, you have this link here. It’s not available in those other two views I just showed you. Here it is available. And so people that can’t come in here and look at this resource or this report, you can copy the URL. And you can create a dashboard for this. So let me just show you how to do that real quick. The Dashboards area, we can create a new dashboard. And we can create something called an external page. And we put the URL in there. And call this Chuck’s team capacity.

And let’s just make that same thing we used for our dashboard name. Now we can save and close this.

And you can share this dashboard with anybody you want. In your organization, you can also put it on layout templates, et cetera. And this is still interactive when you’re in here.

OK, so what if you’re not ready to track planning OK, so what if you’re not ready to track planned hours yet? Can you still get a sense of how busy people are? Well, yes, you can. It won’t be as accurate as planned hours. But it’s a quick report. And it’ll give you some idea of what you have to work with. So we’ll go here to this report, which is people on Chuck’s team and how many assignments they have. These are the people. Let’s just go and take a look at how this report is put together. We’re just using the default view because we’re not digging into there much. But you could add more columns there if you wanted. So in filters, here again, we’re making sure we’re looking at working tasks. We only want to see a task where the assigned to, this is the task owner, has Chuck’s team as their home team. You could use other ways to do this. But that’s what we’re using here. We want to see also where only projects that are current. And we want to see tasks that are not complete. We’re going to group those by the assigned to name. Now, there could be many people assigned to the task. The person that’s assigned first will be the task owner if there’s nobody else. If you have several people assigned, it’ll still be that person who is assigned first unless you change it, which you can. But we can group by a single item only. We cannot group by a list of items. So that’s why we’re doing it by the task owner. So that’s a limitation. If you have several people on things, the only way you’re going to know how their planned hours of allocation was divvied up is in those other resource reports that in the resource planner. That gets it all down to the individual person. But if you normally just assign a task to one person, this should work pretty good. I decided to put in here a subgrouping of progress status just so we can get an idea of how those tasks are doing when we’re looking at them. And that gives us the ability in the chart then to add both the assigned to name in our grouping and the progress status. And put that in a stack that’s kind of a handy way to show that.

OK. So last thing I wanted to show you is the reporting web page before we get to our questions. In order to get to the reporting web page, easiest way to do it right now, so you have it bookmarked, is all help articles. If you just go to the Help Particles here, the training area, New Reporting is what it’s called. And here it is. There are several videos here to help people who are new to reporting. There’s a section on the basics, links to get into reporting classes, lots of links to reporting resources here. These can be help articles or blogs. There’s an area called Beyond the Basics.

This is where we’ve got, we’re going to post when these workshops are, these webinars. And even have a link to register from here.

Links to take the advanced reporting class here. It’s available both as a recorded class or live. Now here is this basic text mode resources I was telling you about. These are the blogs, links to the blogs that we’re done showing you some basic text mode examples and things you can do. So we’d recommend you look at this one first. They’re all pretty brief and basic. But this will give you a little idea of kind of what text mode is about. And then we’ve got some things here. You can create a detailed user view with some pretty cool things in it. Or this is what we were looking at, changing ID numbers to names. There’s another thing that’s going to be added here that is not here yet that deals with built-in reports. There are a lot of built-in reports in Workfront. If I go to reporting area, a lot of these reports are things that come with Workfront that are good examples. Usually you can tell them by they don’t have it entered by with them. If you want to get some more details about how to find these reports and how to use them, help is another good place to go here. So we’ll just go here. And we’ll type in built-in reports, or just built-in. This I have in there anyway. Using Workfront built-in reports. Here we’ll show you a couple of things. How do I see a list of them? Well, you actually need to build a filter for that in your report area. And it tells you how to do that. And then there are all these built-in reports here that you can use for things. There’s 70 of them. So they’ve got the report name and the description that goes with the report here. What we’re adding to the reporting web page here is screenshots of all of those reports. So right now, I’ll just show them to you on here. So all 70 of the reports, you’ll see screenshots. And you’ll be able to just go in here and look through them and kind of get an idea of what they’re about. See them bigger than this. You can see the description is the same description there, the name. But let’s suppose that you got to this one of a matrix report and say, hey, that’s pretty close to what we need. I’m going to go and find that matrix report. So what you would do is just go to your reporting area. And I happen to have that built-in reports filter here.

And let’s go look for that. I’m going to find portfolio cost group by program by month.

Now, when I come in here, I don’t have an option to copy this. But I do have an option to edit it. So I’m going to take that. And in this case, maybe I want to change something about it. Maybe I want to change it to be grouped by quarter, for instance. So I can do that.

I can’t save it. But I can save it as a new report. So I’ll go ahead and save this.

It puts the word copy up there. I’m just going to change this to by quarter.

And now I’ve got this as one of my own reports. Now, it is important, or at least advised, that you do this with any of the reports that you want to use. Because there’s an option to turn off built-in reports for people. If we go over here to access levels, the review access level has new built-in reports turned off by default. So does request.

There you go.

But anyway, since this can be turned on or off, and you don’t know whether somebody has it on or off, if you want them to see your reports, I’d recommend that you make the reports your own by doing that edit and then save it as a new one. Then you can share it with anybody. You can put it in dashboards and share those. If you have a built-in report and you put it in a dashboard and share the dashboard, anybody that has their access turned off here is not going to be able to see it.

OK, so that’s it for the presentation. Sorry it took a little longer than usual. I’d like to emphasize on the questions, that your questions will all be answered. So please include as much detail as you can in there so that when they’re answered later, I’ll be able to know what you’re talking about. I might just try a few things if I am not sure. Hopefully get the right answer out there for you. So we’ll go ahead and open that up now. Perfect. Chuck, we’re going to go back to the concept of mixed for a bit because we have quite a few questions from people that have multiple categories in their mix. So I’m combining questions from Shane, Brandon, Matt. If you want to listen up if you’re still on the line, we’re going to be talking about your question. So the easiest one that encompasses it all, if I have four categories in my mix, can I create a goal for each and then report on the delta between the forecast versus plan versus actual? So for example, four categories, campaign, business, unit, web, and product. We have the categories at the project level and custom forms and fields. The goals would be to create a quarterly forecast, a budget and forecast, then track planned hours towards that and ultimately actual. Happy to repeat that for you, Chuck. No, that’s good. And yes, you can put as many categories as you want. The run versus change is one common way. It’s an important thing for people to know. So that’s why I was using the example. But yeah, doing as many as you want, that’s fine. And as you notice here, if I go to this report that I had in the first place, I think this is it. No, that’s the copy. Sorry.

There we go. So I’m showing the percentage difference here of these two. And if I had four in here, I’d see the percentage difference from all of them. I could do this with, I guess a stacked report with percentage would probably be the best thing. And it would give you those different percentages of each of the things in whatever grouping you had, whether it was by quarter or something else. You could also group them just by the category itself. So you’d have four categories here side by side with a column and the planned hours in it. That wouldn’t be too difficult. So yeah, you should be able to do that without any trouble just following the same basic idea of what we’re talking about here. So let’s move to the next question. I’m sorry we can’t do follow up questions here very easily. So I’ll go ahead. And when I answer the question, I’m going to answer the same question again in that list of answers. And I’ll play with this a little bit, make sure that if I have any other ideas about it, I’ll put it in the answers there. I’ll make sure that the idea I’m telling you really does work. Thanks, Chuck. Go ahead. Can you talk a bit about how you can get around the limitation of when there are multiple team members on a task or a team in terms of capacity planning? So yeah, so you’re probably referring to the limitation of being able to group on who it’s assigned to.

In order to group here. I believe so that we know what’s not included. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah. So there’s no way around it, really. I mean, how do I group on multiple things? You’ve got to get it down to one thing so there’s a group of it. Otherwise, if you’re grouping on each of the things, you’re going to have a grouping for each one of the people in those. So that’s one of the, I mean, you’ve got to pick one of the things. And if you designate the task owner as the one that’s most responsible for it, that’s one way to make sure that it’s as accurate as possible. For the division of the planned hours, it will show the spread and how busy people are in this. Let’s see here.

I think I might not have that one around anymore. OK, let’s go back to people. So even though you have the difference in the planned hours for different people and what they have assigned, it may come some from one task, some from another. And you’ll see which projects they’re involved in here. But that’s a little different than what we’re talking about in this report. So feel free to clarify that question or maybe follow up with that question in the Q&A. And I’ll get to it after the meeting. And it will be included in that list. Hopefully, that’s a little bit helpful. OK, next question. Thanks, Chuck. Yep. OK, so we’re going to shift to the Resource Center. In the Resource Center, how do we account for tasks that were planned in the past but not completed? The planned hours do not seem to roll forward. And therefore, they do not show in future weeks as tasks or hours that need resources. Yes, that’s right. They don’t. So what you need to do, there’s no automatic rolling forward. And when you think about it, when you’re the project manager working on something like that, you can’t assume that the same person can still do that same task because they might not be available at the time that it now needs to be done because it wasn’t done before. So whenever things slip, you need to basically replan. And in replanning, you set the status back to planning, usually. It will take all of the tasks assigned to everybody off of their to-do list of work to do. They usually are all based on just current projects. So it takes it out of current. While you replan and figure out what you need to do, you might have to get some permission from stakeholders to slip the date. And you might have to adjust the resources well with it. But that’s part of the job of a project manager to figure that out. So it’s not easy. And because of that, and I think because of that. I’m not in product. But I think that that’s why they don’t have an automatic feature set. I’ll just roll all these forward all the time. That might be something that would be appropriate in a certain situation where the kind of work you do lends itself to that. But right now, you just need to do that manually. And that would be a good suggestion actually in the idea exchange to say, hey, well, it doesn’t apply to us. Can we have a feature that just rolls these things forward automatically? And if you get a lot of votes, it might get in there. So no guarantees. Not for me anyway. Next question. Yeah. So going back to the Chucks team capacity assignment chart that you created, how do you color code? Well, first, can you show those filters again? We had a couple of people that needed to see the filters you chose. And then can you explain how you color coded the report bars, i.e. amber for behind, red for late? And can you change the color order to be more logical, say red, amber, green, or the reverse? Yeah, good questions. Well, here’s this. So take a screenshot of that or whatever.

In the chart, so you had a couple of questions. One is about just the order of these. Yeah, we can’t sort the order. We can’t say which of these is going to be on top or on the bottom, the red or the green or whatever the colors were. You can change the colors, though.

What you’ve got here, if I click on Custom Colors, I can come in here. And here’s the options that I have for this. And it’ll do the same thing if you’ve got a custom field here. But if I choose Late, I can say, well, I want late to be red.

And then I can add a different color for on time. That’s already green. That’s good. Any of these colors, of course, you can put in any color code here that you want. And it can be a custom color of your own brand or whatever it is. This is an RGB code, red, green, blue. And if you have an RGB code from a color that you’ve got, they’re not just a work front thing, you can plug it in here. This is an editable field. So that would be how you would change the colors. But again, the order, the sort order, isn’t something that you have control over. Did I get all the parts of that question, or did I miss anything? Yep, I believe so. And we can come back if we miss any pieces of that. We will come back to you after the workshop and our answers.

Can you open the filter screen back up again, Chuck, really quick, and just leave it there for a second? And if anyone’s trying to write these filters down in the screenshot, you don’t have to worry. We will be sending this afterwards. So you can just relax and watch if you’d like.

All right, I’m looking to see if we have anything that can answer in our last 60 seconds.

Let’s see here. Chuck, can you show how they can customize labels on the charts? They found that when a particular customer, Harris, found that when she created the chart to reflect project services, the name of the home group ends up being included in the label.

Are you talking about the labels, I think, here, like name or record count? So these labels here, well, these are the names of the people. This is assigned to name. The only way you can change these, it has to be a field that you’re dealing with here. You can’t go into text mode and change anything here. But you can create a calculated custom field, name it whatever you want, and have a calculation in there that says, put the assigned to name in this. And then it would just say whatever you name that calculated custom field, you just have to use that in your grouping. OK. Thanks, Chuck. To all of you who have questions in our queue that have not been answered again, we will be coming back to you. A few of you have received messages from us that say that we need a little bit more detail. So do expect follow-ups. And we will get the recording and all the session notes, slides, and resource materials out to you shortly. Once again, visit the community blog today for the Workfront Wednesday materials to reference. And thank you so much for attending. We hope you found this valuable. And we’ll be back for more. Have a great rest of your day, everyone.

Bye.

Bye.