With our latest additions to the Workload feature, you can get a complete picture of team capacity at a glance and manage resources more efficiently and effectively.
In an ideal world, every team member would have an equal amount of work (so no one’s overburdened), the right people would be working on the right tasks (so everyone’s maximizing their abilities), and everything would be delivered on time (with no last-minute requests or U-turns). But in the real world, things rarely go quite so smoothly. New work is constantly popping up, team members are unexpectedly unavailable, and priorities can shift in ways you didn’t expect. At times like these (i.e. almost all of them), it’s more important than ever to be able to see where the gaps are, who’s overloaded, and who’s available to take on more. That’s why we’re so excited to deliver the newest additions to our Workload feature, the first step towards facilitating resource management in Teamwork Projects.
![A quick guide to project execution](http://images.ctfassets.net/gg4ddi543f5b/6hVWNCeIU50ld4nGECkFJb/22aba9ccdc7d60b0cbddcf9b707167be/5-things-you-need-to-know-before-writing-a-project-management-plan.png)
A quick guide to project execution
Every project needs a game plan. In project management speak, that game plan is called project execution—a step-by-step outline of how you're going to keep a project on track, on budget, and deliver it on time. Your project execution should include everything, from the project's scope to a deliverable plan.
What is Workload?
Those of you who have already been using it in Teamwork Projects will know that Workload gives you an overview of where and how your teams time is allocated. Now, with the new and improved Workload, you’ll also get an overview of each person’s available capacity and the ability to reassign tasks to balance tasks across your team, enabling you to be more flexible in responding to situations that arise or shifting priorities. Not only that, but you can now identify resource bottlenecks before they impact your project timeline. With the new insights Workload provides, you can make smarter, quicker, more informed decisions, and take pre-emptive action to ensure your team doesn’t get overwhelmed.
![undefined](http://images.ctfassets.net/gg4ddi543f5b/1AsKJuftqUW18i6T3ihRPG/cc43c5155715071f69b6e3df7efb84de/workload-intro-4.gif)
Using Workload will help you to: 1. Avoid bottlenecks Ensure your projects have enough resources to meet their deadlines, and have the flexibility to shift priorities. 2. Get powerful resourcing insights Rely on real and easily accessible data to determine which team members are operating under capacity and available to take on more work. 3. Easily re-prioritise work Quickly and easily re-assign work and add project resources to balance workload with a simple drag and drop function. 4. Make more informed decisions Assess your teams bandwidth for any given time period to make more accurate decisions on project delivery timelines.
Take a tour: the new Workload
The Workload section has been redesigned with a more intuitive UI. You’ll notice it also now has two sections: Overview and Planner. Overview shows you how much work is assigned to the team, and their overall capacity, over a period of time. Planner gives you a more granular, calendar style view of this work and shows you how work is distributed in blocks of time.
![undefined](http://images.ctfassets.net/gg4ddi543f5b/c9eBH30YLGOcmT48UTf6b/a25c4b5dcfa0dbfcbf0a2347dd054be5/Oct-14-2019-10-26-23-5.gif)
Within those two sections, we’ve added a ton of new enhancements to give you more visibility and provide detailed insights into team members’ individual workloads. Capacity Bar We’ve added a new Capacity Bar to the Overview section. This is a visual indicator of how each team member’s workload (the total estimated time on their tasks) compares to their capacity (the amount of work they can take on). Their capacities can be customized in their profile. Manage User Workload Selecting Manage User Workload in the Overview section shows you what each team member has on their plate at any given time.
![undefined](http://downloads.ctfassets.net/gg4ddi543f5b/6eVtSm3agIoEs2oaOuaxc8/8037b5ddff4e76680ac681de2ac854ef/new-5.gif)
If you’re a project manager, this is where you’ll be able to see all your team members and navigate easily between them. You’ll be able to identify which users are overloaded and see which other team members have more bandwidth to take on their work, making sure you avoid any bottlenecks that could derail the project deadlines. The drag and drop interface makes it really easy to reassign work. You might decide that it makes more sense to adjust some due dates of less important tasks, and you can do that quickly and easily from here too. By selecting to see only the team members that have capacity remaining, you can quickly get a more focused view of who is available to take on more work. You can also add new team members to certain projects directly from this view, if you’re finding that you have no resources available within the existing team to take on more work. This makes it easy to call reinforcements if you’re in a crunch and re-balance the workloads, all without leaving this view.
![undefined](http://images.ctfassets.net/gg4ddi543f5b/wqCep2lF4ChgFST1owFip/ed4d3e260550ab53239072c664a560ac/add-new-user-3.gif)
In the Overview section, users who have no tasks with estimated time assigned to them do not appear. However, in this Manage User Workload view, these users will show up, so you have more options when it comes to reassigning work. Planner In addition to the Overview, we’ve added a new Planner section which gives you a day-to-day visual representation of each team member’s capacity. You can think of this as a kind of heatmap: it shows you the breakdown of work using color-coded blocks, so you can see at a glance whether things are blue (yay!) or red (oh no!). While the Overview shows you a person’s overall workload compared to their capacity over a particular time period, the Planner gets more granular by showing how that work actually breaks down each day. For example, someone could be showing as over capacity overall, but when you drill in you might see that they’re overloaded on one day and not another during that time frame. In that case, you can easily level out those resources directly from this view.
![The ultimate guide to resource management](http://images.ctfassets.net/gg4ddi543f5b/3stTFMmxGTvHR0s05JU89E/2f51a66c1a18ff238d0cb3f817b0a509/the-ultimate-guide-for-resource-management-blog.png)
The ultimate guide to resource management
Simply put: resource management gives your projects a better chance of being successful. Having a plan to allocate, manage, and forecast what your people will be working on not only means you can make sure you have enough people for every project in your pipeline—but also those that are working won’t get burned out.
You can also click into each section to see the specific tasks which make up the time block, and reassign or edit them as necessary. From here, you can make quick decisions around re-balancing your team’s workloads and action them by editing tasks directly from the quick view panel, just like you would anywhere else in Teamwork Projects.
![undefined](http://images.ctfassets.net/gg4ddi543f5b/6z7XWPFst00spzLxtO0SnR/2495449f1dc21bf5778cb39f22626588/planner-view-4__1_.gif)
You get Workload, you get Workload and YOU get Workload…
While users on Grow and Scale plans will have full access to the full Workload functionality, we wanted all our customers to be able to experience the value of Workload. That’s why we’ve decided to make it available in some form on all plans. Users on the Deliver plan will get access to Limited Workload, where they will be able to see a roundup of estimated time and remaining capacity for each team member, click into the task count and view the tasks included, and directly jump in to edit the tasks from there.
Start using it now
To get comfortable using Workload and explore the full feature set, join one of our dedicated Workload webinars and let our Customer Success team answer any and all of your questions:
And as always, you can reach out to our Support team at any time at support@teamwork.com.