Resource Management Basics

Transcript

Hello, I’m Mica Bonesack, a Customer Success Architect here at Adobe. Today we’re going to talk about getting started with resource management.

Let’s take a few minutes to talk about the resource management journey we are about to embark on. This presentation is designed to guide you in your preparation to use the tools and have accurate data.

First off, you may want to think about your resource management goals. There are many reasons why you might want to use the resource management tools. For example, your leadership teams may want to understand the capacity of your teams, or you may just want to understand if you have enough resources to complete the work you have planned next month or next quarter.

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, one tool may be more suited to help you achieve your goal. The resource planner provides the bigger picture view that leadership teams are often asking for. Things like forecasting or utilization of your resources.

On the other hand, the workload balancer is more tactical. It allows you to make assignments based on users workload in real-time. Diving a little deeper, the resource planner allows you to forecast the resources that you’ll need to execute the work and compare that to the resources you have available.

It aggregates the assigned and unassigned work, so you have a clear picture of the resources needed. It allows you to put resource estimates in a column called budgeted hours, which you can report on, and it allows you to prioritize your projects so that you can make sure you assign resources to your highest priority projects first.

I’m hoping you can see in this screenshot, the planned hours here are greater than the available hours in September. The work for copywriters and the work for designers is greater than the resources we have on hand to perform the work. In this instance, we’d try to see if we could push some of the work into the following month or even cancel the work. But ideally, we’d want to see this shortfall much sooner so we could plan on it for hiring additional headcount.

This is the data that the resource planner provides.

On the other hand, the workload balancer allows you to visualize user bandwidth and make assignments based on that data. You can see users time off as well as holidays, assign work items in bulk, reassign work in bulk, and edit the hour allocations for a user.

You can see in this screenshot, the top section shows unassigned work and the bottom section should ideally display the users who can perform that work, so we can see who has the bandwidth to take on a new assignment. Let’s get started. The first question is, how should you prepare? There are four key areas to focus on. Global settings, users, projects and project templates, and campaigns and yearly work. If we have each of these four areas set up correctly, then we should have accurate data in both the resource planner and the workload balancer, and we’ll go through each area in more detail in this presentation. Let’s get started with global settings.

In the setup area, we have one resource management setting that we need to decide on, and that is how resource availability will be calculated, using either the default schedule or the user’s schedule.

Just as an example, the default schedule is handy when everyone is in the same region and has the same holidays, and on the other hand, the user schedule is often used for organizations with global teams in more than one region with different holidays. The next thing we want to do is make sure that our schedules are created and updated. Be sure that you’ve added all your company holidays for the year ahead, and you do this by clicking on the exceptions tab within each schedule. Next, we want to create resource pools.

Resource pools are located under the resourcing icon that you can select in the main menu, along with the resource planner and the global workload balancer.

It’s important to note that you only need to create resource pools for the resource planner. If you just want to use the workload balancer, you can skip this step, but keep in mind that once you start using the workload balancer, you may decide you want to use the planner also. So it might be just as well to create the resource pools as part of your prep. Here are a few commonly asked questions.

Resource pools often align with a group or department. They are used to partition work being done by a particular group or department that will not overlap with other parts of the organization. For example, an HR department may have a separate resource pool than the marketing department. Both departments may have copywriters, but they’re only assigned to the work for their department or resource pool.

Please note that there’s no formal limits on the number of users that can be added to a resource pool, but if you have, say, over 200 users in a pool and you’re noticing some lag in the tools, you might want to consider decreasing the amount of users in that pool. Now let’s talk about users.

For the users, the following details need to be in place. The user’s work time is accurate, and we’ll go into more detail on that in the next slide.

The user’s job role needs to be accurate. The user’s job role percentages need to be accurate. The user has the right schedule. The user has the right FTE value. And the user is in the right resource pool or pools.

Please note that users do not need to log their time for your organization to use the resource management tools. It’s great when users log time because we can start to see how close we were to the planned hours, which is great data to have, but not mandatory. So if your users are not currently logging time, don’t let that discourage you from using the tools. You can use planned hours to account for user time behind the scenes.

I just want to call it this pro tip. I often create a user report or user view to see what user details are either inaccurate or missing. And the good news is we have a report built and ready to go in a blueprint, which I’ll talk about in a minute. It’s very important for some organizations to adjust their users capacity. And the best way to do that is with a feature located in the user profile called work time.

Work time is the percentage of FTE time that the user is available for actual work, not including overhead. It must be a decimal number between 0 and 1. For example, if a user only has 30 hours out of their 40-hour work week to devote to work front project work, the work time value would be 0.75. It’s important for your users to log their time off in work front so that you have accurate data in your resource management tools. Time off is used in the calculations for both tools. You may have other systems where you log time off, so this could feel redundant, but I think the rewards are worth it. Moving on to projects and project templates.

When you open the resource management area of work front, you will see data. The bigger question here is, is the data accurate? You may have heard of the adage bad data in, bad data out, and you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the areas of work front that need to be maintained to surface accurate data. Having accurate dates, planned hours, and assignments in your projects tasks is critical to having accurate data in the resource management tools. So let’s talk about projects and project templates. Getting the data as accurate as possible in your projects is critical. For the work to be accurately calculated in the resource management tools, we need the tasks and issues to have a duration greater than zero, the tasks and issues to have planned hours that are greater than zero, the tasks and issues have an assigned job role or a user with a job role, all assignments are made to child tasks because assignments made to parent tasks won’t be calculated, and finally resource pools and resource managers need to be assigned to the project. The easiest way to put data in the right place is to use project templates. So you create the project templates, you preset this data, and you create projects from these templates. I know this is easier said than done and getting accurate project templates can be time consuming, but out of all of the preparation areas this will likely take the most thought and effort, but I think it’s well worth it. When looking through your project templates, here are some areas to focus on keeping updated. So you want to make sure that your job roles are assigned to child tasks shown here in the pink section. Make sure that the durations on each task are greater than zero in blue, and make sure that the planned hours on each task are greater than zero in orange. And let’s talk about the final preparation area, getting future work into Workfront. It sounds like I’m stating the obvious, but it’s worth saying anyway, the resource management tools can only give you data for the work that’s in Workfront. So this begs two questions. How far in advance do you put work into Workfront, and how far in advance do you want to forecast your resources? If you want to forecast further out than you have work in the system, you may need to strategize how to get your work into Workfront earlier. Getting work into Workfront early enough to plan for resource shortfalls is a challenge for most organizations, and it often involves a complete mental shift in how organizations treat future work. Many of us, myself included, get work into Workfront just in time to execute it, but not enough time to properly plan for it. We could have a whole webinar that tackles how to get work into Workfront earlier, but the main takeaway is that the resource tools can only forecast your resource needs for the work entered into the system. So you want to strategize with your teams or leadership on how you can get your work into Workfront sooner.

One idea is you could schedule planning sessions monthly, quarterly, and yearly, where everyone is expected to enter known work into Workfront. This slide summarizes all the prep work that needs to be done in Workfront to utilize the resource management tools. This is essentially your checklist. If you have tackled all of these areas and all of these items, the data in the resource planner and the workload balancer should be accurate. Just to recap, you’ll need to set task planned hours, job roles assigned to tasks, and finally we have a blueprint ready to be installed in your instance. The blueprint contains a project template that serves as your checklist for all the prep work that needs to be completed to generate the most accurate resource management data, and a user report to help you make sure your user information is accurate and complete.

Thank you for your time. I am so excited you’re getting started in this resource management journey. you