Resource Manager > Staff schedule page [guide] – Workamajig

The staff schedule is designed to show your available resources based on task dates & allocated hours.

At a glance, this screen can be used to get an idea of how busy everyone is & let you determine if you need to move around some resources.

For more detailed insights, the drill-down tools can be used. You can then manage your users on a weekly or daily basis. You can also forecast work that needs to be assigned to a user, based on the service that is preassigned to the task.

NOTE: To get the most out of this report, you must be assigning services (and users) to tasks with allocated time.

Navigation

Offices and the staff schedule

Workamajig allows you to set up offices to track different locations, usually separated by time zone and/or country. An office can have different holiday/non-working days set up on office-specific calendars. The projects & staff that are associated with an office will follow that office's non-working days. These will be identified either as a yellow bar in the column or on the individual cell. Staff not associated with the office can still be assigned to the task & enter time, as it is still seen as a working day for them.

Date range

By default, the page will display the next two weeks of data, but you can click on one of the predetermined ranges.

Or click the Edit icon to enter a custom date range.

Depending on the amount of data & date range you choose, the screen may take longer to load.

Options

By default, the page will display task assignment data relating to active projects only. You can make changes to show more or less information, based on needs.

Each user who accesses this screen from their own login can change their view options of this page.

Department - This is a great option to use, it will only display the users & services of a single department, that you might happen to manage. Users & services can be linked to a department in their setup. Then you can reap the benefit of that here.

Group by - Using the Group by option is a great way to see all your users & services that are linked to a department all in one view, yet separated/grouped.

NOTE: When using the Group by option, the summary row of each department/office will show the average daily hours for all users within that department/office. This way you can see if it's even possible to reshuffle the assignments within, or if you are going to need additional help overall.

Project meetings - If you use calendar meetings heavily for project-related tasks, then link those meetings to the project & task. In the options here you can check 'exclude project meetings', so those specific types of meetings do not calculate into each user's daily hours.

Print

You have several options if you need to print the staff schedule.

Choosing Staff schedule Excel gives you additional options for printing.

Week view

When looking at the data in a week view, it buckets the hours by week.

Upon clicking on a row, you will then be shown a detailed breakdown of the assigned tasks & hours for that user over the next few weeks.

You can click on a row to adjust the dates & hours allocated. Or even click on the Task name in blue to open the task for even further details.

Day view

This view takes the data to a deeper level. Where you can now manage users by the day. And visually see if a person is blocked out, or if there is a company holiday & how that affects the resourcing.

For example, if we click on the grey box of 8 hours for John Doe on the 17th, we see the following.

Since this user has a meeting (PTO day) that is blocked out for the day, the system automatically shows it as 8 hours that are used in resources for the day. If there were other tasks due that same day, then those hours would be added to the 8 hours of the all-day / blocked-out meeting.

Next, let's look at the 20th for John Doe: it shows 12 hours & the box is red.

The red box appears because the allocation for the day has gone over 8 hours.

In the details, we can see this is a 2-day task with 24 hours of allocated work. This is 12 hours each day.

For even more details, just click on the row, which will open the full task details.

Updating assignments

From the list of assignments to a person, you can check the box next to each one to either reassign them to another user or to add users to the task to alleviate the overloading of hours to one user.

When you reassign a task, you can choose the person to reassign it to, and if the project is active, then it's best to check off 'send notifications', so the person you are assigning this to gets sent an email about this change.

When you choose 'add to tasks', you choose a user & enter the hours' allocation in the row. Keep in mind that this does not reduce the hours of the originally assigned person.

Assigning by service

Not only can you juggle the work between users, but you can forecast work needing to be performed by assigning a service and allocating time to your future tasks. The following is an example of what this may look like. Where you can see that account management & art direction are needed later next week.

From the Day view, you can drill into the hours & reassign through there.

However, you can on the Switch icon that appears for the roles only, and this will make the assignment(s) appear on the right.

At which point you can simply drag & drop the assignment onto the desired user.

And here is the final result of the above example, where Bill Sanders now has the hours allocated for next week. Also, notice how art direction is no longer under roles since there are no remaining hours.

NOTE: You can reassign to 'unassigned', and the assignment will go back to the roles section, so long as it had a service originally.

Meetings

Meetings from the calendar can also affect the staff schedule.

There are three ways this has an effect, blocked-out meetings that are not all day, company holidays, & individual vacation days.

Block out meetings

This is where you have a meeting that you are an attendee. The meeting is checked as 'block out'. And it's for part of the day.
You will see the meeting's hourly duration calculate into the hours per day/week.
To see this meeting, you will need to drill down into the hours' breakdown screen.
See the New meeting event [in-depth guide] for more info.

Company holiday

This is when you have a company holiday where no work is to be scheduled.
It prevents the date from being used as a start or end date of a project & task.
A black column will appear over the day when looking at the day view of the staff schedule.
8 hours will be shown for each user in place of the blocked-out day.
If you see more than 8 hours, this is due to a task being scheduled for that day in some other capacity & the hours are unable to move past.
See the New company holiday [in-depth guide] for more info.

PTO / out of the office

This is when an individual will be out of the office for an entire day or more.
While this doesn't prevent the user from being scheduled to work that day, it does show a yellow box for the days out.
Like company holidays, it will put a placeholder of 8 hours for the day to show that is how much time is being used.
If you see more than 8 hours, this is due to a task being scheduled for that day in some other capacity & the hours are unable to move past.
See the New out of office event [in-depth guide] for more info.

Block out recalculation

You may see some text appear at the top of the staff schedule that refers to blocked-out meeting updates in progress.

When this occurs, it's because someone added a meeting to the calendar that will have an effect on the staff schedule. However, this action is queued up behind the scenes.

Once done, you will be prompted to refresh the screen to see the changes.

Resources

Creatives today [guide]

Calendar [guide]

Articles in this section