Yearly planning in Wrike

Hi everyone!

It's coming to that time of the year when we are planning out all our big projects for 2026. I'm interested to know how others do this within Wrike? We are just getting into the use of Workload charts and I feel these are great to show assigned effort for individual users but we want to show blocked out time for teams as a whole. We have looked into using 'booked effort' to show this high level view of time however we have not really used this before so I'm interested to know if anyone has used this as a way to do yearly planning and capacity planning for big projects?

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Pietro Poli

Hi @Amy Hunter,

We made sometingh similar and here’s how we handle it in our team:

We use a Wrike Analyze dashboard to see all planned activities for the future, grouped by team or by role.
When we need to plan important projects, we add them using Blueprints, keeping the job roles as assignees (instead of specific people).

This way we get a clear long-term view of the workload without assigning tasks to individual users too early. It also helps us understand whether we will have available capacity or not.

Hope this approach can help you too!

Jim Tuell

Hey there Amy!

We’ve been through something similar when planning out large scale projects in Wrike that span over a year and I would like to share what works for us! We utilize the Workload Charts to really get into individual assignments, but for higher-level capacity planning across teams we’ve found two things especially useful: Booked Effort and Effort at the Project Level
Using booked effort is a solid way to block that time for upcoming projects without assigning tasks to specific individuals beforehand. This allows you to plan ahead when you know the basis will be time consuming. This also lets you forecast team availability.

For yearly planning we often set effort at the project or phase level instead of each task. This gives our leadership team a view of how much time is being reserved for initiatives over the year without needing to know every single detail upfront.

I know this may not cover everything that you need, but we have found it incredibly useful and hopefully it can also serve you! Best of luck.

Amy Hunter

Thanks @Pietro Poli and @Jim Tuell both of these approaches sound very useful! I'm going to play around with this and hopefully we can work something out. I really appreciate both of you sharing what has worked for you.