Resource Manager > Staff schedule page [guide]
Guide contents: Navigation | Office | Date range | Options | Print | How It Calculates | Week view | Day view | Edit Columns | Updating assignments | Assigning by service | Meetings | Resources
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, you can 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 the next two weeks of active task assignments. You can make changes to show more or less information based on needs.
NOTE: Each user who accesses this screen from their own login can change their view options of this page to their liking.
People Filter
People Filter - Everyone, Noncontractor, Contractor.
Services (any of) - Filter to show only users who have the selected Service(s) in their Employee record of designated Services. And only shows those assignments to that Service. Also show any unassigned assignments with that service.
Offices (any of) - Filter to show only users who are linked to the selected Office.
User (any of) - Filter to show only assignments for the the selected User(s).
Departments (any of) - 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. In that case, you can reap the benefit of that here.
Team (any of) - Filter to show only users who are part of the Team setup. Not the Team selected on the Project setup.
Project Filters
Project Filters - All Active, All Inactive, Selected Status.
If you check Selected Status, then it will filter for all projects in the selected status(es). This is useful if you want to see projects/tasks that are not yet active and how the planned assignments mesh with your current work.
Project Types (any of) - Filters the assignments down to projects of the selected Types.
Parent Company - Filters to show assignments for projects where they have the selected parent company setup.
Client - Filters to show assignments for projects of a specific client.
Project - Filters to show assignments for a specific project.
GL Company - Filters to show assignments for projects of the selected GL Company(s).
Campaigns (any of) - Filters to show assignments for projects of the selected Campaign(s).
Offices (any of) - Filters to show assignments for projects for a the selected Office(s).
Display
Max WK Hours -
Max Day Hours -
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.
Default Weeks - By default this is set to 2. If you wan t to see utilization numbers match the week hours, then set this to 1.
Hide Zero Hours Services - Hide assignments where there are no Allocated Hours. But if time has been entered, either prior to the current day within the search date range, or the assignment was marked done today. Then the zero hours assignment will still appear.
Show Hours For Tasks With Predecessors Complete - Show only assignments where the previous task is complete. To see what is planned, regardless of the current schedule and predecessors, its best to uncheck this.
Exclude 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.
Display Details In Main Grid -
Auto Run - When checked this will force the screen to calculate and load when first opened.
Locked Columns - Extends the locking of Columns past the first column (Name) that is always locked. By default this is 0, and the Name Column is Locked when scrolling left/right.
You have several options if you need to print the staff schedule.
Choosing Staff schedule Excel gives you additional options for printing.
How It Calculates
Generally speaking, the hours per day is calculated as Remaining Allocated Hours divided by the Remaining Days in Duration.
For example, if you are scheduled to work on a task that spans 5 days, Monday thru Friday. And are Allocated 5 Hours. Then you would see 1 hour per day for that task.
- If a tasks dates run prior to today, then it uses the actual time entered to the task on each day prior. Notice the red line in the Daily View that denotes this separation.
- If the tasks dates run through today or after, then it uses the Remaining Allocated Hours divided by the remaining days in duration.
- If a task is still open today, then the Allocated Hours for today and forward will be what the system uses to make its calculations. Regardless of how many hours are entered to the task today.
- If a task is completed today, then the actual hours of that task are used to formulate its calculation today.
This is true in all weekly views of the tasks and schedule.
NOTE: Assigned Users who use the Today Creatives page will see the time they entered today calculate into their remaining hours this week.
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 manage users by the day. You can also 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 yellow box of 13 hours for Chan on the 2nd, we see the following:
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 1st for Chan: it shows 18.36 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 4 tasks showing 2.86, 8.00, 6.00, 1.50 giving us a total of 18.36 Hours Per Day.
For even more details, just click on the row, which will open the full task details.
Edit Columns
In the drill-down of the Week View or Day View, you can edit the columns to display additional information about the assignments.
To open, drill into one of the view, the. click on More > System Settings.
Next, click on Edit Columns.
Check the Fields you want, adjust the Display Order and Save.
NOTE: Date Task Assigned is the date of the last time any assignment on that task was updated.
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.
Reassign
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.
NOTE: Any actual hours the original assigned user already entered will be deducted from the remaining hours allocated to the next user.
Add To Tasks
When you choose 'add to tasks', you choose a user & enter the hours' allocation in the row.
NOTE: This does not reduce the allocated 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. Here, 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 turn on the Switch icon that appears for the roles only, and this will make the assignment(s) appear on the right.
At this point, you can simply drag & drop the assignment onto the desired user.
Here is the final result of the above example, where Lucy Lou now has 5.43 hours allocated for next week. Also, notice how account management is now reduced by 1 hour.
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.