When you want to track your own work packages as an employee, you find them in the main menu under Work packages. This article describes how the list is laid out, how to book a project time directly from a work package, how to maintain the remaining effort, and how to read the status colours and your own workload.
View work packages
The Work packages main menu shows a list of all packages you are assigned to as the responsible employee. A filter at the top of the page lets you choose the period (default: previous month up to two months in the future) and the work package status — by default, the states Escalated, Uncritical, and Critical are active; completed packages (Done) remain hidden until you explicitly enable them.
Per work package, the following information is visible in the table:
Title and assignment (project, task, ticket, subtask, or customer)
Period (from – to)
Planned hours, Actual hours, and Remaining effort
Status with colour marker (green/yellow/red/grey)
Work factor — the daily effort needed to complete the package by the end date
On hover over a work package, ZEP shows a flyover tooltip with the most important data at a glance: planning object, period, actual hours, planned hours, remaining effort, status, and the note if available. The list can be exported as Excel or CSV via the export icon.
Note: Your own work package view functionally matches the employee view that administrators and project managers open for individual people — filtered to yourself. Creation workflow, status calculation, and filter options are described in detail in the article Create and Manage Work Packages.
Click actions on a work package
A click on a work package in the list opens a context menu with all available actions. Which of them are offered depends on the package type and your rights:
Record project time — opens the booking form for a new project time, preset with project, task, optionally ticket or subtask, and the stored note from the work package. You add the date and time yourself.
Enter remaining effort — opens the remaining-effort dialog (see next section). Enter a number of hours or click Done to set the remaining effort to 0.
Set work package to Done — closes the package directly without going through the remaining-effort dialog.
Switch to planning object — jump to the associated task, ticket, or subtask.
Note: You cannot record times on customer or project work packages — the action Record project time does not appear there. Instead, clicking on the work package takes you directly to the corresponding customer or project.
Selecting a work package in project time entry
You can reach your work packages not only via the Work packages main menu but also directly from the project time entry in the Project Times main menu. This lets you pick a suitable work package as a template while booking a regular project time — without the detour through the work-package list.
When creating a new project time entry, the link Select work package appears at the top of the Project selection field. A click opens a popup with your own work packages — filtered to a period of fourteen days before and fourteen days after the entry date. This way you only see the packages that are relevant for the currently booked date, instead of scrolling through the whole list.
Click on a work package in the popup: ZEP closes the popup and automatically fills in the project, the task, optionally ticket or subtask, as well as the stored note from the package into the booking form. You add date, time, and duration yourself as usual. The transferred values can be overwritten at any time before saving.
Note: The Select work package popup only appears if the Resource Planning module is active. Customer and project work packages do not show up in the selection because no times can be booked on them — only packages at task, ticket, or subtask level are bookable and therefore selectable.
Estimating the remaining effort
The central control element in the employee view is the regular maintenance of the remaining effort. With a current estimate, you keep your project managers and yourself informed about the remaining work — and ZEP recalculates work factor and status automatically.
Why remaining effort instead of percent progress? You can usually estimate much better how many hours you still need than quantify an abstract progress. ZEP uses your estimate directly to calculate work factor, status, and workload.
Open the desired work package from the list. Next to the Remaining effort field, a pencil icon appears; a click on it opens the remaining-effort dialog. Enter the estimated remaining processing time in hours or days there and save with OK.
When the work on the package is finished, click the Done button in the dialog. This sets the remaining effort to 0; the package switches to the status Done and no longer generates workload.
Via the history icon next to the remaining-effort field, you open the popup Change history. The table lists per estimate the date, planned hours, actual hours, entered remaining effort, and the estimating employee — sorted in descending order by date.
Tip: Maintain the remaining effort at the end of each working week. This keeps the status traffic light meaningful for all stakeholders and you notice early when a package runs off track.
Status colours
The status calculation follows a traffic-light system:
Green (Uncritical) — remaining effort fits into the remaining time.
Yellow (Overloaded or Remaining effort > Planned hours) — attention needed, but no escalation yet. Either the package runs in parallel with others beyond the available daily capacity, or the new estimate together with the actual hours exceeds the original plan.
Red (Overbooked or Expired) — plan exceeded or end date reached with remaining effort. Escalation to the project manager recommended.
Grey (Done or Nothing to do) — package is completed or currently generates no daily effort.
The detailed calculation rules are in the article Create and Manage Work Packages.
Own workload
Optionally, ZEP shows a graphical visualization of your overall workload below the work-package list — the summed work factors of all running work packages relative to your daily available working time.
The display shows two layers on top of each other: a grey area represents your availability per day in hours; brown bars on top visualize the workload generated by work packages. On hover over the grey area, the hour value appears; on hover over a brown bar, the workload percentage. If the brown bar exceeds the grey area, you are scheduled beyond your daily capacity.
For the chart to appear, two conditions must be met:
Your administrator has activated the option Displaying total workload under 'My ZEP' in the basic settings. Only then does the corresponding checkbox appear in the filter of your work-package view.
You have ticked the checkbox Show workload charts in the filter of your work-package view (at the top of the page). Without this check, you only see the list of packages.
Note: If the Show workload charts checkbox is not in your filter, condition 1 (admin setting) is not active. In that case, contact your administrator.