Allocating Team Resources & Managing Workload
PROJECT SUMMARY
Duration
March – August 2017
Team
2 UX designer
1 PM
1 customer support
Development team
Responsibility
Competitive analysis
Hi-fidelity design
Prototype
RESEARCH
We started by talking to customer support team and looking into customers feedbacks, as well as check on our data. The current workload has poor page view due to the limited functions.
To solve problems, we used SSNiF framework to deeply analyze the design problem, gained this understanding by interviewing our customers.
Stakeholders
People who manage the project and plan resources. e.g. executives, project manager, etc.
Need
A system that they can allocate and optimize resources, control team workload, evaluate performance, and do calculations.
Situation
They are in a medium to large team (10+) in marketing or professional services, who typically have multiple projects ongoing with durations of weeks to months. They often use additional spreadsheets to perform effort calculations.
Feature
The main features are workload calculation, resource distribution, and report exporting to help avoid overload and improve project success rates, as well as eliminate the need for spreadsheets.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
How can we design an experience that enable people to plan and to optimize team resources while planning work
THE DESIGN
Iteration 1 - V1.0
Where and how to make workload visible?
How to make countable workload?
How to avoid team overload?
Workload entry point
In the flow, managers can allocate resources in the assignee list window when creating a task. This is the ideal place to assign resources. Managers want to know who is available to take on extra work and who doesn't have enough bandwidth.
Before
After
Solve the problem ‘Where and how to make workload visible?‘
To calculate team member availability, the manager needs to estimate the effort required for a task. We explored different ways to guide the manager to input this estimated effort. Once the estimated effort is inputted, the system can then calculate availability based on both the estimated and occupied effort. Here is our idea exploration. We went with the first idea because of the prominent position and the flow of assign a task.
Workload calculation
Demo
THE DESIGN
Scalability
Multiple projects
Budget calculation
Systematical
Timeline view
Export
Help managers optimize allocated resources
We solved previous problems and moved onto the challenging workload page, which provides a comprehensive project overview for managers to monitor team performance at a glance.
② We hide the unassigned tasks by using a toggle panel to make the interface neater and cleaner.
People are able to assign task directly by drag and drop.
We showed individual’s spent time by using number and color to display various status. 2 big changes comparing with previous version:
① display occupied time rather than task name. Refer to the Need in our SSNiF form, when a manager wants to control and balance team’s workload, he will more focus on time distribution rather than specific task.
Demo
USER TESTING
The allocation flows make sense for the users, they can understand how the feature works and are able to avoid overload allocation. But we ignored 2 things here.
It’s difficult to estimate specific hourly effort, while use % is easier for many people.
We organized team’s workload by listing assignees and their occupied hours, but several executives manage project based on tasks and dependency. For instance, how many and what task under a project? how long does each task take? when to start, when to end? etc.
Iteration 2 - V1.1
How to meet variety allocation preference?
How to show tasks and dependency under a project?
Change 1
We introduced more flexible way on allocation - by using %. Also considered about consistency, how the system displace and summary workload will depend on what unit people chose beforehand.
Change 2
We have designed an additional view to cater to different management styles. After tasks are assigned, all arranged resources will be displayed either in assignee-list mode or task-list mode in the workload view. Both of these views benefit users in different ways.
The assignee list mode is useful for resource management, allowing managers to quickly identify team members who have the capacity to take on more work and those who are already overloaded.
The task list mode is suitable for project control, enabling managers to understand the number of tasks under the project, their duration, and who is responsible for each task.
