Creating a workload overview for a small workgroup

[Jan Lötberg]

Edit: Solved

Hi there fellow tech-friends!

Our company just got serious about using O365 to it's full extent and I am one of the lucky ones to get started with it. To begin with I just got a task from my manager that I would like to discuss here in hope for further insight from you veterans out there.

I am supposed to create a tool that monitors the amount of time an employee spends working on different projects and express that time in percentage of the weekly work time.

The idea is that the management can get a visual overview of each group members workload to avoid overbookings (a) and help the employee prioritizing (b). Last but not least, the workload-monitor can be used to give other segments of the company an estimate on when they can expect that a group member can start working on their individual requests (the employees I write about are business developers that can be booked by different branches of the company).

My manager started working on an Excel spreadsheet (off course). But I want to break free of that old school approach and work with the new apps. My idea so far is to use a flow from outlook that automatically updates said spreadsheet whenever a business developer books working hours on a given project in the outlook calendar. The updated spreadsheet then works as the data source for a Power BI report. The manager can thus monitor the workload-spread in real time by updating the Power BI report with the click of one button.

Do your think that approach might work? Any suggestions to streamline that? Do you know if similar tools already exist for O365?

Thanks in advance for your input!

/Jan Lötberg

[#2]

Try StaffHub. It could solve some of your needs.

Regards, Magnus

[#3]

Hi Magnus and thanks for your reply!

I checked out your post on MS Teams and played around a little bit with it. By adding a "Projekt overview and workload"channel with a planner tab I pretty much got what I was looking for. Very easy to use, very nice visualization in the report-view. I created a bucket for every project our group is working on and now my co-workers can do their planning there, automatically sharing it with each other and our manager. The benefit is that we now can take initiative and help each other out when we see a task that we know we can contribute to (our group is spread out over all of Sweden, so we do not share a physical workspace).

Even if there is no direct connection to a workload in percentage I prefer the Teams-planner approach. I think that demand was a little bit stiff to begin with. Everything is in constant motion and you need to be able to adapt to that. The specific tasks that you can create in the planner are better suited to reality in my opinion as you simply can change their deadlines and working-status when more important stuff comes upp.

I am gonna check out your Teams-post in detail now - we are rolling out the app after the summer vacations.

Thanks for sharing!