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Job Roles

Job roles are a part of the Wrike for Professional Services package and Wrike Resource add-on. Admins can create and manage job roles. Regular and external users can assign tasks to job roles.

Overview

Job roles are a grouping category in Wrike. Create custom job roles specific to your company, for example, “designer” or “mobile developer,” and allocate them to users in your account to make future project planning easier. In combination with other features, job roles help you to distribute work among employees, taking into account their available time and required effort. You can read more about how to use job roles below.

Important Information

  • You can allocate job roles to all types of users, including collaborators.
  • Each user can only have one job role allocated to them.
  • You can group tasks in the backlog box of Workload charts by the job role to which they are assigned.
  • There is no limit to the number of job roles you can create in the account.

How to Use Job Roles

Job Roles are designed to help you with planning and staffing your new projects and effectively distributing work among employees based on their workload.

Use job roles:

  • To effectively organize your new projects and confirm that you have enough resources to finish them successfully.
  • To group your employees based on what they do in your company.
  • To assign tasks to these groups of employees without notifying or sharing the task with them.

How to Staff Projects Using Job Roles

There are a few simple steps to staffing your projects using job roles in Wrike:

  1. Allocate them to users in your account.
  2. Identify or create projects that need to be staffed and assign tasks within these projects to job roles. This way all users who have access to the projects will know exactly which talent is required to complete them.
  3. Set effort that’s required to finish each task within the projects and define tasks’ start and end dates This lets you get an overview of how much time employees will need to finish the tasks and over which period of time.
  4. Create or open an existing Workload chart to distribute tasks among employees. Workload chart shows employees’ current workload, so you can easily determine which of them have enough time to finish the tasks that you are about to assign to them.
    Tip! Create a separate workload chart for each group of employees with the same job role. It’ll be easier to see the workload of all available employees before assigning tasks to them.
  5. Set the horizontal backlog box in the Workload chart to show all tasks from the projects that need staffing. Tasks in the box are automatically grouped by job role and project.
  6. All that’s left is to assign tasks to users. Once you match the task that is assigned to a certain job role with the actual user who has that job role allocated to them, the job role will disappear from the list of assignees automatically.

Job Roles vs. User Groups

When you assign a task to a job role, users with this role don’t get any notifications, and they don’t automatically get access to the task. This way you can plan projects without distracting your employees with unnecessary Workload chart and distribute them among your employees while also confirming that they have enough time to successfully finish the tasks.

Create a Job Role

Account admins can create job roles. For admins on Enterprise accounts, this right may be disabled.

Creating a job role adds a new grouping category in your account. You’ll be able to group your employees according to their role in the company, for example, “developer,” “consultant,” “designer,” etc.

To create a job role:

  1. Click on your profile photo in the upper-right corner of the page.
  2. Select “Settings” from the dropdown.
  3. Click "Job Roles" in the left panel.
  4. Click “Add job role.”
  5. From there, you can:
    • Enter a name for the job role. For example, “Designer.”
    • Choose the color of the avatar to easily distinguish one job role from another.
    • Select the initials to be displayed on the role’s profile picture.
    • Set the bill and cost rates for the role.*
  6. Click “Save.”

Your job role is created. Now you can proceed to assign tasks to the job role.

*Bill/cost rates are only available for Wrike for Professional Services accounts.

Allocate Job Roles to Users

Admins can allocate job roles to other admins and users. For admins in Enterprise accounts, this right may be disabled.

After you assign job roles to users, you can view this information in their profile and create separate Workload charts for employees with the same job role.

Allocate a Job Role to a User

  1. Click your profile picture in the upper-right corner of the page.
  2. Select “Settings” from the dropdown.
  3. Click "Users" in the left panel.
  4. Click a user’s name in the chart.
  5. Click the “Edit settings” button.
  6. Click the drop-down menu icon under the Job Role section.
  7. Select one of the roles for the user.
  8. Click “Save changes.”

The job role is now allocated to the user, and you can see it in the user’s personal profile and in the Job Role column in the User Management Chart.

You can always remove job roles from users. To do so, select “None” in the drop-down menu on Step 7 described above.

Allocate/Remove Job Roles From Multiple Users

You can also allocate and remove job roles from several users at the same time:

  1. Click on your profile picture in the upper-right corner of the page.
  2. Select “Settings” from the dropdown.
  3. Click "Users" in the left panel.
  4. Check the boxes next to users whose job roles you want to change.
  5. In the menu that appears on the right, select “Update job role.”
  6. Select a job role from the drop-down menu to allocate it to the user or select “None” to remove existing roles.
  7. Click “Update.”

The job role is successfully allocated or removed from all users that you selected.

Assign and Unassign Tasks From Job Roles

Regular and external users can assign tasks to job roles unless it is restricted by their access role.

Assigning tasks to job roles gives you the ability to quickly overview which people need to work on each of the tasks. You’ll also be able to group the tasks in the Backlog box of a Workload chart when you are ready to assign them to actual employees.

You can add job roles as assignees to:

  • All tasks in your account
  • Task templates
  • Blueprint tasks, if you have Blueprints enabled in the account

Assign a Task to a Job Role

  1. In Task view, click “+ Add assignee.” 1 Alternatively, click on the assignee icon in List view2
  2. In the window that appears, start typing the name of the role and click on it.

The task is assigned to the job role. You can also assign tasks to job roles in Table view and on the table part of the Gantt chart.

Wrike Tip! Use mass editing to assign or unassign multiple tasks from job roles.

Job_Roles_-_Assign_Tasks_to_Job_Roles.png

Note: Users do not get any notifications that a task was assigned to the job role that they have. You can later proceed to the Workload chart to assign this task to a user who will be working on it. A task is automatically unassigned from its job role when you assign it to a user with the same job role.

To unassign a task from a job role, hover over the job role in the assignee section and click on the “X” that appears.

Note: If you add Bbasic or Daily effort to tasks that have job roles among assignees, job roles will also be taken into account when Wrike calculates effort. Flexible effort can only be allocated to users and not to job roles.

Edit and Delete Job Roles

Admins can manage job roles. For admins in Enterprise accounts, this right may be disabled.

To edit or delete a job role:

  1. Click on your profile picture in the upper-right corner of the page.
  2. Select “Settings” from the dropdown.
  3. Click "Job Roles" in the left panel.
  4. Select a job role from the list.
  5. In the pop-up window that appears, you can:
    • Edit a job role’s name, initials, and avatar color.
    • Click the “Delete” button to delete the role completely.
  6. Click “Save” to finalize editing the job role.
  7. Or, if you chose to delete the role, confirm your decision and the role will be deleted from your account.

When you delete a job role, it disappears from all tasks and from the information of all users to whom it was assigned. Deleted job roles cannot be restored.

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