What's an effective way I can plan my resource's hours for the next recurring 12 weeks?

Vanessa Munoz

Right now, my management asks PM's to predict how many hours their resources will be spending on a given task (tasks = rows) per week (1 week period = 1 column)? What's a possible more efficient way to do this? At the moment, we have to manually input new columns after the initial 12 week period is up. It's a time consuming process and requires more automation. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Genevieve P.

Hi Vanessa,

Would you be willing to rearrange your sheet a bit?

It sounds like your weeks would be better suited to rows instead of columns. What about a set-up like this:

That way, when it comes time to add 12 more weeks, you can just use the collapse all function to collapse your rows down to just the Parent rows (the weeks), and drag-fill the dates down, which will auto-populate the Monday in one column and the Friday in the other:

You would need to make sure you select at least 2 rows' data before drag-filling, so the sheet can recognize the pattern. (See here for more information).

If this set up wouldn't work for how you're tracking projects, it would be useful to see some screen captures of your current sheet (but please block out any sensitive data). Another option may be to split up some of the projects but then pull them together into one Report to see 12 weeks at a time.

Cheers,

Genevieve