Personal Time-off

Hi: You’ve got your finger right on the problem, David… If we add someone to the PTO Project, the other projects will show the person still working in that timeframe. You are correct, the User Utilization report will show the person being overallocated for that week of holiday. Because a PTO Project doesn’t adjust the regular project availability, because a PTO Project simply overallocates someone, we chose not to take that approach. We encourage people to declare their PTO in WorkFront, because it manages the calculation of availability okay. What we lack, however, is any reasonable way to report on that PTO. In terms of living with evil, we have chosen to live with the poor reporting evil as opposed to the incorrect allocation of labor evil. Eric

Hi Doug, So if you use a project for PTO and book people on time-off tasks at 100% then this obviously takes care of reporting on their availability (for other work) on a given day during that period, and it would also prevent tasks from moving around if new time-off bookings are added. However, I assume that this would also mean that the "User Utilization" report would show their available hours as full for the month? If you use a PTO project, is there any way in the system you can still get a figure for their real available hours for the month? Or do you just export and work it out in Excel or one of your other tools? Regards, David

Thanks for thinking of us, Eric. Yes, we could probably create a Magic Report or possibly an UberCalc for this, but first, I'd suggest trying to create an out if the box report on new PTO entries this week, and or (gasp) abandoning the PTO concept in favor of a standard project for PTO pirposes, which I find to be more transparent and useful, in practice. Regards, Doug

Hi: Because of the way WorkFront models PTO, it is difficult to navigate that information nicely in the WorkFront reporting engine. To work the issue you have below, I snap a baseline and then as time goes on - and the dates on tasks mysteriously shift around - I compare the baseline to the current plan to find out which tasks have shifted. Then, I look for the usual suspects, of which PTO is a primary cause of dates shifting automatically. I use the baseline comparison to know where to look, then I look at the resources assigned to the task and look for new PTO. AtApp might be able to navigate the PTO and do some nifty things to alert you when PTO is entered. Chris/Doug? Can you help? Thanks, Eric