@Bastien_Siebman - That’s a valid point… in some scenarios. In other scenarios, tracking the subtasks in workload, timeline, and calendar is essential.
Measuring workload by task count is only a fail-safe, plan B option. As we’ve both experienced, tasks vary so greatly in size (e.g. create marketing email campaign could be a 5-hour task while schedule social post could be a 20-minute task). So, utilizing time estimates is generally much more helpful for measuring team workload. And, if we are going to make proper use of managing team workload, any sizable task must be accounted for.
So, let’s imagine a very common scenario, one that I come across with most clients: a project driven by requests (from form submissions). Let’s say a marketing team has a project to track requests for creative assets for holiday promotions for each one of their 10 products. Every request requires graphics, copy, an email campaign, social posts, and a new amazon listing. It involves 8 tasks, 17 hours of labor, across 5 people. The brand manager is in charge of the overseeing the parent task, but the creatives (the employees) are each delegated 2 or 3 of the subtasks. The team processes 5-10 requests per week, each one requiring about that level of effort. So, obviously it wouldn’t make sense to have this all show up as workload on the parent task (because the brand manager’s job only requires about 1- 2 hours of involvement to give feedback and approve). And, it certainly wouldn’t make sense in my opinion to escalate each new task up to a project for every request (b/c of major project overload). But, we still need the workload to be tracked for those graphic designers and creatives.
So, what do we do?
Maybe the answer is a simple toggle at the parent task level that allows us to track the subtasks in workload, timeline, and calendar, or to ignore them.
Thoughts?