We're excited to announce that Workload now has effort and capacity.

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Hi @Kimberlea how can I remove an effort after I add it to a workload?

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Hey @Jennifer7! If you added an effort field to all of your projects in your portfolio, you will need to go to each project to remove the custom field.

After adding effort, you can easily switch to view by task count, or add a different effort field to measure workload by.

15

Can someone share a screenshot of what it looks like to add workload to an individual task?

All of the screenshots for this only show the Portfolio high-level view, but I’m curious how my users would add workload to their individual tasks before I decide if I want to upgrade to get this feature.

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Hi @Seth_Stevenson,

Do you mean for a user to add an effort indication to a task? If so, effort is just a numeric custom field that you’ve told Asana is the custom field it should use to register effort. If you’ve worked with custom fields, it’s just like adding a value to any other custom field on a task. It can be done in the task list view if that custom field is showing as a column, or in a task’s detail pane. You can see a screenshot of both of those options here:

Does that help, or no?

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Yes, I think that helps. So we create a custom field, let’s say one called “hours,” and then my users enter a numerical value for their tasks. Then on the project level we just tell it which custom field should be mapped to the workload?

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Exactly!

Almost - you do that on the portfolio level (on the Workload tab of the portfolio). Here’s an illustration of defining an effort field:

The same custom field applies as the “effort” field for all projects in that portfolio.

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Hi @Kimberlea can you let me know if there are any plans to rollout hours effort custom fields into subtasks - which would feed into the capacity of someones availability?

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@Kimberlea If we multi-home a task, is 100% of the effort put against both projects when looking at the workload view? ie. if both multi-homed projects are in a single portfolio and we go to workload, is that person shown as working on that task x 2?

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Hi Kimberlea,

Hope all is well. I am new to Asana and this forum, but 100% agree with @Eric_Ressler on this.
In order to have a real insight into what percentage of a project has been completed, Asana needs to be able to show this based on the total effort of each task within a project.

In our team, we have project of 9 out of the 10 tasks only count for 10% of the project whilst the 1 open task will count for 90% of the effort/time needed to complete the project. In this case asana will report that a project is 90% completed while in reality it is only 10%.

Do you already have an better indication from your team of when this will be available?

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It seems Effort is divided over the number the days the task is assigned. With the goal of master planning capacity at a high level for a team, is there a way to NOT have the effort divided by time?
Example: I know that Task A will take 30% of my daily time for 2 weeks. If I assign 30 to a capacity field capped at a 100, then the daily load is 3 (30/10 days). We could fake it and assign 300 to the task so that the daily load was 30 but then if the time frame changes, we’d need to manually recalculate and update the load.

For the purpose of our use case, we’d like to just assign 30/100 to the task and have it NOT reference the length of time of the task at all where the outcome is that a 30 (out of 100) effort is assigned to a Task, that the daily load is 30 whether it is 1 day or 1 month.

Possible?

24

Agreed. This is critical. Not including sub-tasks in Workload renders it almost useless.

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hi @Kimberlea! Is there a way to set varying capacity levels for every week? For example, one week I set someone at 50% capacity but then the next week they’re down to 25%? We have resources that are allocated across several projects and therefore the capacity levels change from week to week.

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26

Hi Kimberlea,

Hope all is well.
Can you give us an update on this? We really need to be able to allocate our effort hours over the task days. So if a task will take 10 hours and a user will be working on it 2 days, he should be able to say that he will work on it for 6 hours today and 4 hours the next day…instead of it now being split down the middle.

27

Hi @Terrence_Gonzalez :wave: Natalia here stepping in for Kimberlea.

We don’t have an update to share at the moment, but I’ll make sure to keep you posted on this thread as soon as I have more information on this topic.

Have a nice week Terrence!

28

Hi Natalia,

Thanks for your message.
I think that this is something very critical for all businesses looking to use Asana for workload management. What you have now is basically the same as not having a workload management option, because my workload that is indicated by Asana is not the actual workload of my staff, rendering it useless.

I cannot imagine that Asana is not getting a whole lot of feedback on this function, so your support team should really make it a priority and inform us of a plan and let us know at least when this is going to be tackled.

Hope you understand my frustration, as I would love to stay with Asana, however I need a workload management tool that actually makes sense.

Regards,
Terrence

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29

@Kimberlea is there a way so that effort levels (hours) assigned to subtasks are also included in the overall workload for each team member to compare against their capacity in the portfolio workload view?

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30

Hi @Michael_Barry . If you manually add the subtasks to the project (as they don’t inherit the project from their parent tasks) they will then appear in Workload. Check out this thread for details/discussion: workloads and subtasks . There is also an upvote link in the thread to get this to happen automatically. Allow to automatically add subtasks to project Hope this helps!

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31

Hi Natalia,

Hope all is well.
Any updates on this?

Regards,
Terrence

32

Thanks for following up on this @Terrence_Gonzalez! We still don’t have any updates but we will make sure to post any news in the main feedback thread. I suggest you to add your vote to follow this thread: Workload - Introduce the ability to give different weight to tasks

I’m closing this thread since this feature is now fully rolled out! Feel free to create a new thread in the #tipsandtricks category if you have any questions or a new thread in the #productfeedback if you have any feedback :slight_smile: Thank you!

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