Assign work in the Workload Balancer

Transcript

In this video, you’ll learn how to view the summary panel to see the details of a work item, and make assignments to an unassigned work item.

Knowing who’s available with the skill set needed and at the time needed can be overwhelming and frustrating. However, the Workload Balancer brings that information to the forefront, hopefully making it easier and faster for you to make more accurate assignments.

The duration bar shows either the work item name or the daily allocated hours or percentages for the work item, depending on your settings. But sometimes further details are required to make the best assignments. By clicking the duration bar, you’ll open up the summary panel and see more details about the work item without leaving the Workload Balancer. You’ll see basic information about the work item, for instance, any updates left from previous assignees or managers about the work, any documents associated with the work item, when the work item should be completed, and if the work item needs to be approved at any point. Now you can of course, click on any section and go to the actual work item if needed.

However, having the summary panel built directly into the Workload Balancer gives you that initial information quickly and provides better insight into the type of effort needed without leaving the Workload Balancer.

With the ability to see detailed information about each unassigned work item and what users are currently assigned to in the given timeframe, you’re ready to make assignments to those with the availability and the skill set needed.

There are several ways to make assignments to work items in the Workload Balancer.

While in the summary panel, you can make assignments to the work item by going to the detail section, clicking on assignments, and entering the name of the person, role or team you would like to assign it to.

Once selected, click save.

The summary panel refreshes to show the new assignment.

If you already have all the information and you need to just make the assignment, you can click the more menu, select assign this to, enter the name of the person, role or team you would like to assign it to, and click save.

Lastly, you can simply drag and drop the unassigned work item onto a user.

This works if you’re assigning the work item to just one person.

Making individual assignments works if you’re making a few assignments to various projects. However, if you’re going to make many assignments across multiple projects, doing it one by one is time consuming.

So use the bulk assignment tool to assign, replace or even unassign a user from and for multiple work items at the same time.

For instance, you have two copywriters on your team.

You want to make sure that any work asking for that skill set is assigned to either of your copywriters. Instead of going through all the unassigned work individually, you can use the bulk assign tool.

To do this, click bulk assignments. Then enter or select a field. Either a project name or a project status. In this example, we’re going to select project status.

Leave the qualifier set to equals, click in the search box, and enter the project status or statuses you want to make assignments too.

Or select them from the list that appears.

Here, we’re going to choose planning. This way we can make sure the projects that are being planned will have the copywriter assignment filled when it goes live.

Now, depending on what you want to do, you can select assign user, to assign a specific user to multiple work items based on a job role.

Replace user with another one for multiple work items.

Or unassign a user from multiple work items.

For this example, we want to assign one of our copywriters to any work item that has that job role associated with it.

So we’re going to select assign user, select copywriter in the role assignment dropdown, and select the copywriter from the list that appears.

Once selected, you’ll see a note listed below to let you know how many work items will be assigned to that person for that job role.

When ready, click assign.

From here, the project or projects will be updated.

The Workload Balancer makes it easy to assign work to users either project by project, or across multiple projects all at once. And because you have the information right in front of you making those decisions not only got easier but much faster as well. -