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How do others manage work allocation? Are load bars in plans just coloured decorations?


Guido Schneider (3.4k1486115) | asked Mar 25 '13, 3:29 p.m.
edited Jun 07 '13, 7:13 a.m.

After using RTC for more than a year in a large Company, the teams got a quite good maturity in managing workitems, do estimations on tasks, report remaining work etc..

Now project leaders and scrum masters would like to use the next level of resource management. The usage of the nice coloured bars on plans e.g. the load bar to do forecasting, get indicators where they may run into resource conflicts etc.. They are also interest to use such stuff like team capacity and other resource planning features.

Within RTC there are three basic elements to do define capacity of a person.
a) working hours per day, quiting time per day
b) schedulede absences of whole days
c) Team based work allocations in percentages

We have started to manage this values in each profile. But we see here a very big gap in the needed functionality in RTC.

I would like to get the experiance of other customers how they manage this figures in RTC. Below some points where I see a lot of potential.

a) The work allocation UI is miserable from my point of view. More or less unusable for a end user. It sorts in an not understandable way, it automatically assigns percentages, it's difficult to change values. You do not see for which team you allocate percentages, if you are member in different teams with same name, but different hierarchy or project areas. We often use period based work allocation, because people work part time for other teams. This ends in many work allocation entries (e.g. 10 and more for a user a year), which are very hard to manage in this UI

b) The work allocation for a user cannot be set by his project leader nor his scrum master. Nobody knows who has the right to do this.

c)  Calling the profile out of the personal dashboard, does not show all this important values. The menu items are not there.

d) Absences in the past cannot be filtered out. After one/wto years, each one has 50 and more absences.

e) Absences are ordered by oldest first. Who is interest in absences wto years ago.

f) You cannot show absences in a plan with the WebUI. Only EclipseUI can do that.

g) The Team capacity report is not very usefull. It shows the daily number of hours, instead the cumulated hours in a burndown style. So you would see how much hours you still have in the sprint. Idealy it should be enableble on the team sprint down, so you get an idea about the remaining work and the remaining capacity of the Team. 

h) Workallocation of archive users are still in available hours of load bars and reports.

g) Workallocations done in archived projects or archived teams are still calculated for the users 100% work allocation.

For all of them I filed enhancemend requests.

  1. Work Allocation on WebUI shows the Team not below the Project Area where it belongs to (185739)
  2. On WebUI, the Planned Time View is not showing the out of office information of the users (185595)
  3. Allow filter out past absences in Scheduled Absences UI (189897)
  4. Allow reverse order (newest on top) in Scheduled Absences UI (189893)
  5. Work allocation of archived users should not be calculated as available hours in plans e.g. load ... (258057)
  6. Load bar in a sprint plan shows available hours only from the members of the owner team and does ... (258049)
  7. Work allocation of users defined in archived project is still visible and in use (258051)
  8. Team capacity report should not taken hours from archived users (258050)
  9. Enable Load/Progress Bar on Special User "Unassigned" in plans, when grouped by Owner (258190)
  10. Provide ability to configure default user/development line % allocations, and/or an easier way to update multiple users allocations at once (68648)
  11. Burnup graph capacity is missing first day of a workallocation (262833)
  12. Support Scheduled Absences in increments less than a full day (78746)
  13. Member of project/team area Adminstrators cannot save changes to team members work allocation (180015)

One answer



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Dr. Hans-Joachim Pross (1.1k4458) | answered Apr 03 '13, 4:27 a.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
edited Apr 03 '13, 4:29 a.m.
Regarding Absense: There is a report format displaying team absense.
But unfortunately I was not able to display this report in a dashboard.

And some more (old) enhancement requests in this area:
Provide a calendar view mode
Provide rollup of scheduled absences of all members of a team area

Comments
Guido Schneider commented May 07 '13, 12:26 p.m.

We have build our own BIRT report to display absences. I will attach it to Provide a calendar view mode


Dr. Hans-Joachim Pross commented May 13 '13, 9:53 a.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER

Guido, I could not find your attachment.

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