Best Practice - Resource Planner

What is an Adobe Workfront “best practice”?

Best practices are guidelines that represent an effective, efficient course of action; are easily adopted by you and the users at your company; and can be replicated successfully across your organization.

As you review these recommendations, please keep in mind that some Workfront best practices are universal while others might be more specific to the topic. Use these best practices as a framework to help guide your Workfront system setups and use.

Navigating this page

As you scroll through this page, first you’ll find a high-level list of all the best practices for the topic. This allows you to review the recommendations without diving into the details of “why.”

The “Why are these best practices?” area, found after the high-level list, provides greater detail into some of the best practices and why they’re deemed as a process, tool, etc., you should consider implementing with your Workfront instance.

Resource Planner best practices

Why are these best practices?

Best practice

Set up Workfront to capture the information needed for using resource management tools.

Here’s why

Your initial system setups should include schedules, planned hours, resource pools, job roles assigned to users, and other work objects because these settings are essential for the Resource Planner and other resource management tools to provide accurate information.

Although your organizations might find that implementing resource management is a later phase of the Workfront implementation, it is important to set up Workfront to capture the information needed for using these tools to provide a more streamlined approach to resource planning and management. This way, you can understand the balance between your resources’ schedule and the amount of planned hours associated with the actual work of the project so the risks of overloading your users and investing in too many or too few resources are reduced.

Best practice

Encourage project owners to use the project-level Resource Planner to estimate the amount of resources they will need for the project.

Here’s why

For budgeting allocations for a single project, project owners can use the project-level Resource Planner since they are most familiar with the amount of time needed for completing the work, as well as with the resources needed to do so. This is not only a great way to manage your job roles, their availability, and general allocation to projects but also to share information in the system-level Resource Planner.

When you budget resources at the project level, this information is automatically reflected in the system-level Resource Planner to provide visibility between the people in charge of the work (i.e., project managers) and the people who staff the organization (i.e., managers, C-level person, resource manager, etc.). This allows various users to get a “bigger picture” of how resources are managed across multiple projects at a system level.

Note: The Resource Planner is found in two areas of Workfront, depending on whether you want to budget your resources for just one project or multiple projects.

Access the Resource Planner of an individual project by going to the project’s Business Case > Resource Budgeting > Edit Resource Budgeting and add details to the Resource Pools to start budgeting resources.
Budget resources for multiple projects by going to Workfront Main Menu > Resourcing > Planner (this displays by default).