Question

How To Better Understand Employee Work Assignments

  • 19 September 2023
  • 8 replies
  • 94 views
Chad Evans
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As our firm grows, I am beginning to worry about our ability to maintain a good view of staff work assignments.  While Karbon does a great job of managing current work, we struggle to figure out a way to get a more macro level view of staff activity.   I’m specifically trying to tackle the following challenges:

  • Is there a good way to get a wholistic view of who is assigned to each role for each client?
  • Is there a way to get a better understanding of an employee’s work load for the entire year?  
  • In general, how do you manage and shift staff assignments to ensure work is evenly spread among the staff and nobody is overloaded?

I really appreciate the feedback!!   I assume this is a challenge many of you all face.  Curious how everyone else manages these issues?

8 replies

B
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Userlevel 4
Badge +6

Hi Chad. 

  1. Not sure on this one but I’ve tagged @Aliesa Jackson to see if she can answer. 
  2. I think this would depend on how far in advance you’re having your work and tasks created and if you’re utilizing the budgets on each work item. If you have the Practice Intelligence add-on I believe there’s a report that does capacity planning. You can also do some light capacity planning in the Work section by using filters, sort by Assignee, and adding the hidden column called Display Column Totals. 
  3. Mainly me and the manager on my team talk to people. If they’re feeling overloaded then we look at their work and shift around. We also use MRR managed as a metric (for bookkeeping) and have a rough estimate on how much a bookkeeper can handle per month. You could apply that to tax preparers as well. You can also use step 2 above to do some capacity planning. But talking to your team is the best way to know how they’re feeling about their workload. 
Rebecca Williams
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Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi @Chad Evans!

re: your second point, and echoing what @blueprintbrian said, we had a standard rule that tasks for all work items are created one month in advance regardless of the type of work or how far in advance the actual work item creates. This means anyone can use their My Week view to at least see what work will be on their plate in the next ~30 days. When the 2 weeks setting was used (the Karbon default I believe), others involved in work wouldn’t be able to see that until the work was almost starting.

 

In terms of entire year, that would be difficult unless you had all work creating that far in advance. I wouldn’t recommend it though, for a couple of reasons:

  • The more work items that have been created, or the further in advance they are created, the more difficult and cumbersome it is to update or maintain hygiene of those work items (as they won’t always inherit changes)
  • Your work lists and searches will show a lot of future work that is largely just noise!

I think it makes sense to create about 3 future work items in advance, for example

  • monthly work creates 3 months in advance (3 future work items ahead)
  • weekly work creates 1 month in advance (4 or 5 work items ahead)
  • quarterly creates 6 months in advance etc. (2 work items ahead

If you had weekly work creating a year in advance, that’s 52 future work items in a single client list, plus all their other work!

Continuous Improvement
Chad Evans
Rank

Hi Chad. 

  1. Not sure on this one but I’ve tagged @Aliesa Jackson to see if she can answer. 
  2. I think this would depend on how far in advance you’re having your work and tasks created and if you’re utilizing the budgets on each work item. If you have the Practice Intelligence add-on I believe there’s a report that does capacity planning. You can also do some light capacity planning in the Work section by using filters, sort by Assignee, and adding the hidden column called Display Column Totals. 
  3. Mainly me and the manager on my team talk to people. If they’re feeling overloaded then we look at their work and shift around. We also use MRR managed as a metric (for bookkeeping) and have a rough estimate on how much a bookkeeper can handle per month. You could apply that to tax preparers as well. You can also use step 2 above to do some capacity planning. But talking to your team is the best way to know how they’re feeling about their workload. 

I appreciate this feedback.  We’ve considered using the Practice Intelligence add-on, but at first review it didn’t seem to give me the information we need.  I’ll ask our contact to show us more on the capacity planning report. 

Chad Evans
Rank

Hi @Chad Evans!

re: your second point, and echoing what @blueprintbrian said, we had a standard rule that tasks for all work items are created one month in advance regardless of the type of work or how far in advance the actual work item creates. This means anyone can use their My Week view to at least see what work will be on their plate in the next ~30 days. When the 2 weeks setting was used (the Karbon default I believe), others involved in work wouldn’t be able to see that until the work was almost starting.

 

In terms of entire year, that would be difficult unless you had all work creating that far in advance. I wouldn’t recommend it though, for a couple of reasons:

  • The more work items that have been created, or the further in advance they are created, the more difficult and cumbersome it is to update or maintain hygiene of those work items (as they won’t always inherit changes)
  • Your work lists and searches will show a lot of future work that is largely just noise!

I think it makes sense to create about 3 future work items in advance, for example

  • monthly work creates 3 months in advance (3 future work items ahead)
  • weekly work creates 1 month in advance (4 or 5 work items ahead)
  • quarterly creates 6 months in advance etc. (2 work items ahead

If you had weekly work creating a year in advance, that’s 52 future work items in a single client list, plus all their other work!

Yeah, this really is the challenge.  I’d like to have the work created in advance for planning purposes, but doing so makes the day to day management much more difficult.    It would be great if there was a way to pull information on to be created recurring projects before they’re created in the system.  Maybe this is something Karbon will add on in the future. 

Rebecca Williams
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Userlevel 7
Badge +12

 It would be great if there was a way to pull information on to be created recurring projects before they’re created in the system. 

@Chad Evans that would be a great feature request - an admin “work to be created in next x months report” or something. If you create one, link it here so we can vote!

Continuous Improvement
E
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Userlevel 2
Badge +2

We would love better/annual capacity planning also. This is particularly useful for recruitment purposes. We need a simple way to shuffle work around within a year too - i.e. so we can spread the work appropriately.

 

We are currently having to use an external excel spreadsheet as well as Karbon. Y axis = employee X axis = day, completed with each job in the cells. For example, ours showed us we have capacity at the end of the calendar year so we know the capacity for taking on new clients, for example.

SamG
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Userlevel 7
Badge +15

On the when is something created discussion. We create it based off how often it occurs but only usually to give us 1 in advance:

E.g. weekly is created 1 week in advance, monhtly 1 month, quarterly 3 months, annually 1 year.

The theory is to do with accounting periods/financial years.

2023 Annual Compliance is started anytime from 1 Jul 2023. We’re working on the period 1 Jul 2022 to 30 Jun 2023 (2023 FY) but we’re doing it sometime between 1 Jul 2023 and 15 May 2024 (2024 FY).

When we are working on it (even when we’re not, but just sometime before 1 Jul 2024 when we might start 2024 Annual Compliance), we might be sent or find something related to 2024 FY.

By having it (2024 Annual Compliance created), we can easily add something to the timeline or time to the work item.

We don’t have the tasks and budget create until closer to the start date (usually 2 weeks prior to start date) so that changes should be inherited if the tasks are updated as we go.

Hope that helps 🙂

P.s. we’d also like a better way to manage capacity and work (both created and to be created) in Karbon.

LD7E
Rank
Userlevel 6
Badge +7

There is the ability to perform a more long-range plan using an Excel file provided by Karbon. Ian mentions how to obtain within the Capacity Planning Video here: Capacity Planning (Scroll down on the page to the video)

I have not asked my rep for a copy as it does seem like a lot of work and my firm is small enough where I would not need this.

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