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Transcript

Estimating the time it will take to complete a task can be very difficult. But to make any real plans based on the resources you have available, you need to provide some sort of estimate. Even a rough estimate is better than no estimate. And you can refine your estimates as you proceed with the work and have a better idea of what it will take to finish the work. Remember, Workfront can help you see the big picture as well as keep track of the details better than you trying to keep it all in your head. All Workfront needs is as much as you know or can reasonably guess to start. That’s why Workfront created the Work Effort feature to help you get started on projects where planned hours are tough to estimate. In many projects, this may be all you’ll need. But if you want to fine-tune your estimates along the way, you can do that too. The better you can estimate the hours tasks will take, the more accurate your project plan will be, and the better idea you’ll have of your resource usage and availability. The Work Effort feature is not enabled by default, so you’ll need to turn it on in your project. To do this, edit your project and go to Task Settings. Check the box to Use Work Effort to Automatically Calculate Task Planned Hours. Workfront will calculate the planned hours based on these percentages of the duration of each task. You can adjust the percentages used for these calculations if you want, but we’ll take these as they are. Click Save. Initial planned hour estimates have been made by Workfront based on the task durations, but you can change them. One way to change the work effort on a task is to open the task and go to Task Details. A Medium Work Effort calculates planned hours as 50% of the duration. Duration was 5 days or 40 hours, so that would make this 20 hours for Medium. We can change this to Large if we want, and it will calculate at 75% of the duration, so it should be 30 hours after we save it. There you go. An easier way is using Inline Edit in a custom view. We’ll open the Work Effort view for this. This view does not come with Workfront by default, but it’s easy to create, as you’ll see later in this video. Here we have a Work Effort column, where we can change the work effort, and it will change the planned hours. This task does not allow us to use Work Effort, because the task duration type is not simple. Work Effort is only available when you’re using the simple duration type on a task. In this view, we can change the duration type, but before you do this, make sure that the simple duration type is right for the task. For more information about duration types, see the tutorial link in the text after this video. If you want to change multiple tasks to the same Work Effort all at once, you can use the Bulk Edit feature. Just select the task you want, then click the Edit icon. We’ll set all these to the Large Work Effort. If you don’t have a Work Effort view, it’s easy to create one. Just click on the View dropdown and select New View. Click on Add Column, and in the Show in this column, start typing Work Effort and select it from under the task. You can move it over next to Planned Hours if you want. You can add a column for duration type as well if you want. Name the view Work Effort and click Save View. For more information about creating custom views, see the links in the text following this video.