Understand planned hours

Planned hours are the estimated amount of time it will take to complete work. If planned hours is less than duration, it means the person assigned to the task has time to be assigned to other things as well. Workfront can show resource managers when people are over-allocated or under-allocated based on the planned hours of the tasks they are assigned. Planned hours are important if you’re using Workfront’s resource management features. They are also important if you’re tracking the time users spend on their tasks. Time tracking will help you improve your planned hours estimates in future projects. They can also help a user get a sense of how much time you expect them to spend on a given task. If they don’t agree with your estimate, this is a good opportunity for them to clarify the work that needs to be done. If you want to use planned hours but you don’t need them to be very accurate, you should look into using Workfront’s Work Effort feature. To learn more about this, see the link to the Work Effort tutorial in the text after this video. Making the best planned hours estimates can take some time, but I’ll show you the process and you can decide if it’s worth it for your situation. Of course, the very best way to estimate how long something will take is to have already done it once and to have kept good records of what you did and how long it took to do So, what’s the best way to make accurate estimates the first time you do something new? Here are some tips. Short, well-defined tasks are easier to estimate. Encourage workers to break a long task into multiple short subtasks, even if they’re all assigned to the same person. A worker may complain that they already know what to do and would prefer to just mark it off when they’re done. But remember that completed projects should never be deleted in Workfront. They should be used for reference when planning future projects. And the tasks in those future projects may not be done by workers who already know what to do. Time tracking really helps too. The better you are at keeping track of the time spent, the better your future planned hours estimates will be. Workfront has excellent time tracking features. Also, document any changes in scope along the way and any problems and resolutions that came up. Your completed project can be a great historical record for future planning. The easiest way to add planned hours to a single task is using the Inline Editing. Just click in the Planned Hours field to add or edit the planned hours. Remember that the planned hours are calculated for parent tasks. It just adds up all the planned hours in the subtasks. You should also include planned hours in project templates whenever possible.