Clarity

Are there any best practices or suggestions as to when and how to use the Effort task in workbench most effectively?

At the start of a project, we will sometimes use the effort task to 'mimic" the overall allocation curve of a resource to a project. (Allocations = Assignments)

THe challenge is pivoting from this to more detailed task assignments as we star tto learn enough to build out the project tasks. (We end up with Assignments in the effort task, and assignments in the "new tasks". This results in a tedious process of nalancing the ffort across the two types. Very low value, for the amount of weffort required.

Just curious if there are tohers who have employed better uses or if we are on an island by ourselves.

That is how you do planning which is incrementally more detailed.
When having just effort task is not detailed enough and when full WBS in possible at the planning stage you have to move from one to the other.
OWB does not allow for assigning resources to summary tasks and even if it did that would just eliminate one step in assigning resource effort from to the task level.
Whether you use effort task or a small number of tasks for the same purpose you still have to transfer assignments and there are not options to doing that manually.

Martti K.