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Sign InResource Allocation
With OneDesk’s resource allocation and analysis tools, you’re able to quickly assess where and when to assign work to ensure you’re using your resources to their fullest potential. Optimize work efficiency by assigning tickets, tasks, and projects to your team, balancing their workload, and reviewing work performance to learn how to improve your workflow.
Managing workload and workflow
With work views:
A quick way of visualizing resource allocation in OneDesk is through views - particularly the Gantt view and Assignee Board custom view. To access the Gantt view, navigate to either the Tasks or Projects application, and select “Gantt” from the “Views” menu on your left.
The Gantt Chart shows your organization’s workload and the workflow which must be taken. Heavier workloads are darker sections of the top bar, whereas lighter workloads are the brighter shades.
You can create a custom Gantt chart to see a breakdown of workload and workflow by assignee as shown above. To do this, hover over “My Views” and select the “+”. Add “Assignee(s)” as a grouping and save your custom view.
For a more in-depth look at the Gantt chart inside OneDesk and what you can do with it, see: Gantt Charts.
The Assignee Board is a custom view which you can create from the Card layout. Hover over “My Views” and select the “+” to create a new custom view. Select “Card” for your layout, and change the grouping to “Assignee(s)”. Save this view and share as needed. Now you have a status board showing each user’s assigned tasks. You can easily visualize how many tasks a user has to complete through this view, and you can reassign tasks as required by dragging the tasks to another user’s column.
Through workflow automations:
Workflow automations are a powerful tool in OneDesk for streamlining your day-to-day processes. Automations in OneDesk will undertake actions on your items in response to triggers being met, specified by you. To create or edit automations, go to More Applications >> Administration >> Automation Center
An example of an automation to help allocate work would be to assign all incoming tickets to the Customer Support team on a round-robin basis. Create a workflow automation which runs on tickets and has a trigger set to “item is created”. For the action, choose “assign by round-robin”, and select the Customer Support team.
Save this automation and now new tickets will be assigned equally between all members of the Customer Support team. There are many more uses of workflow automations to manage resource allocation. OneDesk maintains a list of common and useful workflow automations.
The assignee window
When you assign a task or ticket, you do so from the assignee window. The assignee window has a helpful workload view built into it. The workload view allows you to see a given user's availability. You can assign a task to the best available agent and schedule the task in one place.
Analyzing workload and workflow
Using the dashboard
The dashboard in the Tickets and Tasks applications is a quick way to view items that still need to be completed, the status of your schedule, and the distribution of assigned items.
This dashboard shows an overview of all items in your current view. It shows how many items are inside the view, their status, work remaining, whether you’re ahead of or behind schedule, and more. Hovering over the pie chart will show the distribution of items by users for that view.
As this dashboard updates to only show these metrics for items in your current view, you can refine your view as desired and see the workload and progress for that specific view change in real time.
Many chart properties are interactable, allowing you to filter and drill down further into the information.
Through the analytics application - Charts
If you want more in-depth analysis than the dashboard, the OneDesk Analytics application has you covered. Go to More Applications >> Analytics >> Charts to get started.
In this section of the Analytics application you can view a variety of pre-made chart series to analyze your work by selecting the dropdown menu on the left. The date range can be adjusted with the dropdown on the right.
If there is a custom dashboard you would like to create, hover over “My Views” and select the “+”. You can add individual charts into a custom view here. Examples of useful charts include:
- Pie chart of items by assignee
- Unsolved tickets by status
- Tickets by selected property (Source shown)
For more information on how custom chart dashboards can be used, refer to this article.
Through the analytics application - Scheduled reports
The Analytics application also houses the “Scheduled Reports” tab. You can run reports on various metrics for your organization. There are many templates available by default, and you can create your own templates as required by selecting “New Template”.
Example reports for managing resource allocation and workload include the Project Roadmap, Time Spent on Each Project, Projects by Due Date, and Tickets/Tasks by Assignee.
Reports can be scheduled to run at specific dates and times, down to the minute. Past reports will appear in the “Past Reports” section to be accessed in the future. OneDesk has an in-depth article on creating reports, complete with examples of some useful report templates to create.