Resource Management is such a huge challenge within my company - generally a difficult thing to conquer in any line of work, really. You need people to close deals, people to revenue the work, people to train the people, and sadly⊠even people to (what often seems like) babysit people. It is difficult to know who is available when or who is burdened doing what⊠if you donât have a holistic capture of the work.
As my team continues to dig deeper into how we capture and manage our Workload through Asana, it is important to make sure we also consider the time when we are scheduled NOT to work. I canât effectively set a capacity on the effort in Workload unless I introduce the volatility of the time away from work.
With this tip, Iâll simply share a structure to manage Holidays and Personal Time Off (PTO) among a team using Asana Business. This can be done in just a few simple steps:
- Create a Project Template that includes all the upcoming Holidays and placeholders for PTO that users can forecast themselves
- Include the common Custom Field that defines your Workload effort
- Add additional custom fields to delineate the data over time or denote the status of PTO
- You might also consider including references like job codes that users should charge time to - if that is often something that gets overlooked or mismanaged
- Most importantly, be sure to have all tasks multi-homed to a master project that pulls in ALL of the tasks created from this template so there is a single project that could be added to any other Portfolio
- Create the aforementioned Master Project where all tasks from the Project Template can be multi-homed
- Add a Rule to the Project Template that multi-homes any new tasks to the Master Project
- This will be key once users start to define their PTO and look to create/delete tasks within their own copy of the template.
- Please note: Even though there is a rule within the Project Template that multi-homes new tasks to the Master Project, this rule doesnât run when templates are used (duplicated). Therefore, youâll need to make sure all tasks within the Project Template are indeed multi-homed to the Master Project. Unfortunately, this will show unassigned tasks for those with pre-selected dates.
- Create a Portfolio with either the Master Project or each of the individual Projects customized by team members
- If setup correctly, the end result is the same - as the Master Project is simply a collection of the rest
Thatâs essentially it. Now the team can manage their time away from a central place and see how this time impacts the actual work they have allocated or planned. Below is a screenshot example of what a template could look like.
BONUS: For those interested in seeing the data in greater detail, there are tricks to leveraging the Google Sheet integration so you can do things like:
- Manage the use of individualâs PTO bank (time remaining, time overbooked, time not forecasted, etc)
- Manage the scheduling of floating holidays (where applicable)
- Charting to track M2M utilization
- Look-ahead charts (below) to see who is IN/OUT when over a stretch of time
Weâve been using this structure for a bit and am quite pleased with the flexibility and ease at which the layout provides. Iâve answered several of your questions below and hopefully provided some clarity that makes this tip seem more valuable. Thanks again.