Resource management settings for users

When it comes to understanding what resources are available, there are several things that need to be applied to each user in Workfront. Here you’ll learn about those settings, which are schedules, personal time off, and job roles, in addition to a couple of other important features. Schedules are important because they identify when users are available for project or teamwork. The default schedule built into Workfront is Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. But, this can be modified to suit your organization’s needs. The schedule should also include company holidays when no work is done. Schedules don’t often change and are set up by Workfront administrators. However, if a schedule needs to be changed or updated, please contact your Workfront administrator. Once schedules are created in Workfront, they’re assigned to users to indicate when they work. Although creating schedules is the recommended way, you don’t have to use them. There are two other options that can help determine when users are available for work – FTE and work time. The full-time equivalent, or FTE, tells Workfront if a user is a full-time employee or not. Using the system default schedule, it represents the number of hours dedicated to work during a day or week for a user. So, if your organization expects a 40-hour work week with 8-hour days, give all full-time employees an FTE of 1. If they’re part-time, give them anything less than 1, like 0.5. Within that work week, users are typically doing both operational work, like answering emails, attending meetings, researching answers, etc., and project work and or team assignments. For a resource manager, it can be difficult to know how much of that work week time is allocated for project or teamwork. That’s where the Work Time field comes into play. When you enter a number of 1 or below, it tells the system how many hours a user has for that type of work. For example, if a user has an FTE of 1, which is 40 hours, and 0.75 is entered into the Work Time field, the system calculates that as 30 hours available for team or project work assignments. This way, managers get a more accurate view of who is available and when. In addition, users should be able to enter their personal time off in Workfront. Although Workfront was not designed to replace your current system for managing time off, it is important to make sure time off is entered into the system so users are not scheduled for work while they’re gone. Personal time off can be entered from the Time Off section on a user’s page. For more information, see the Personal Time Off tutorials. Job roles pinpoint what types of skills users possess and ultimately what work you can assign to them. Job roles can be assigned as general or as specific as your organization needs them to be. For more information, see the Create and Manage Job Roles tutorial. For resourcing purposes, it’s important that each user be assigned at least a primary job role to indicate what skillset they have. However, more than one job role can be applied to a user. Along with each job role, there’s a spot for Percent Allocation. This tells the system how much time a user should spend for each job role listed. The percentage allocation must be entered if you plan on using the resource management tools to view and assign work. Workfront’s resource pools are the collection of users needed at the same time for the completion of a project. If you intend to view resources by project in Workfront’s Resource Planner, you need to create resource pools. Otherwise, the Resource Planner won’t show any user or job role availability. Workfront recommends that when getting started with resource pools, you create one pool for all users. Larger organizations may choose to add more resource pools by either department or subteam. Resource capacity for a project is based on the users listed in the resource pools associated with that project. Those with the edit and manage permissions for resource management in their access level can create and edit resource pools. Workfront doesn’t limit the number of resource pools you can create, and each pool can have as many people as needed. Resource pools can be created by selecting the resource area from the main menu, going to the Resource Pools section, clicking New Resource Pool, and from there enter the name and members of the resource pool. To add people you can either add them individually by entering their names, or add people in bulk by entering the name of the team, job role, group or company those users are in. When done, click Create.