Workspaces and Resource Management

Overview

Workspaces as a resource management concept initially can be confusing because you are looking at, determining, and then setting the future estimated schedules for members for any Non-Project type work.  Often this type of work has not been tracked or even thought about before but consumes our workday as typical “overhead” or administrative or operational work. Your estimated schedules that you create for your Workspace members will get more accurate over time as you grow and evolve in your Workspaces usage and knowledge. Additionally, estimated schedules can be edited at any time by the owner for each month and each member of your Workspace, so there is a lot of flexibility built in to meet your needs on Workspaces. 

If you do not capture the estimated schedule on Non-Project Work (Workspaces) for members, it will be very difficult to do true Resource Management as you will never truly have an understanding of Resources' current schedule of work and future availability to take on additional work. Workspace's Schedules plus active Project's Schedules shows the total estimated time a resource has scheduled. Thus, the time left is the Remaining Availability that a resource has to be scheduled on future projects and/or other work assignments.

A simple equation can be thought of as: CAPACITY - SCHEDULES = AVAILABILITY. CAPACITY is determined by the Daily Capacity for a User (typically 8 hours) and then subtracting the Days Off (typically organization-wide holidays that are common to all Resources). SCHEDULES are determined by Project Schedules (estimated schedules should be set for all Resources on all Projects) and Workspace Schedules (Non-Project work - estimated schedules should be set for all Members of each of their Workspaces).  See below Examples for these concepts and how it impacts Resource AVAILABILITY.

Setting a Schedule in Workspaces

To set a users schedule in TDNext, a workspace owner should:

1. Click on the Workspace Details drop down menu in the bottom left and select "Manage"
2. On the Workspace management pop up click on the "Members" tab
3. Check the box(es) next to the user(s) you want to set the schedule for
4. Click on the Actions button and choose "Set Schedule"
5. Choose if you want to add time by percent of capacity or hours
6. Enter the desired values for the appropriate time frames and save

To view a schedule, select the user and in the Actions menu select "View Schedule"

Examples

In the charts below, you can see the inflated resource availability that exists without Workspace time. This example uses an 8-hour workday (Daily Capacity) in a month with 21 business days and 2 holidays (Days Off).

 

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