This article covers four approaches to managing resource capacity in TeamDynamix projects, including capacity planning for project requests, hours reporting, reviewing allocations before scheduling, and managing resource pool requests. Also outlines the access and configuration prerequisites needed before getting started, including access to Work Management, Project/Portfolio Planning, and Workspaces applications, as well as capacity management and daily capacity hours settings.
Overview
The content below is intended to help shape best practices for an organization's overall resource management. We will look at 4 different vantage points related to managing resource capacity within TeamDynamix projects.
Once users are set up as resources, their capacity settings typically do not change, and the capacity value will be maintained throughout the system. Once resources are scheduled, their capacity remains the same, and what is left over is known as availability. The availability amount should be viewed to evaluate how much room there is in the schedule for that person or that functional role.
By default, a user's capacity is 8 hours per day, Monday–Friday, totaling 40 hours per week. This daily capacity may increase or decrease at the user level. You can also set a capacity span for use cases such as temporary employees, consultants, and contractors. Users can also be inserted into a resource pool.
Assumptions
This article assumes that:
- You have entered all your enterprise users in the system.
- You have given Work Management, the Project/Portfolio Planning, and Workspaces application access to the appropriate users.
- The appropriate users are set to have their capacity managed.
- The user's daily capacity hours are set.
- Days Off have been configured in TDAdmin to account for holidays and other companywide events.
Your TeamDynamix administrator may need to configure the appropriate settings for the users you’d like to manage.
Four Approaches to Managing Resources
One: Reviewing Resources for Scheduling Project Requests
Once you estimate the resources needed for project requests at the functional role level and after projects have resources scheduled within them, that data will be available in Capacity Planner.
The Capacity Planner tool in the Portfolio Planning application lets you toggle projects and project requests on or off over a specified span to see how their resource needs interact. For example, you might toggle off an existing project that could be put on hold to allow you to schedule two smaller projects that could provide more total value. The Capacity Planner tool breaks out overall capacity by Functional Role, and you can drill down to see what it shows for each user's availability.
This could be most useful when you are reviewing or vetting these project requests, but are not sure of the human capital costs.
Learn about using the Windows Budget and Capacity Planner.
Two: Reviewing How Many Hours Are Being Logged for Projects
In the Analysis application, start with the Actual Hours Report, User Status Report, and User Work Report. These reports can help you determine how many hours are being logged against other, similar projects, so that you can estimate how much of a commitment is needed from a resource on a project.
Using the Analysis application allows you to report on projects regardless of project membership, whereas the results of a project report in a Project application will only return reports to which you contribute.
Three: Reviewing Allocation Before Adding Resources to In-Progress Projects
In Resource Management, the four reports in the Reports section provide a month- or week-view of the schedule and availability for each user, functional role, and resource pool.
Four: Managing Resource Requests for Users Inside Your Resource Pool
Resource Pools can have the following settings applied by a TeamDynamix administrator:
- Notify Resource Pool manager when resources are assigned to projects – This will send an email to the Resource Pool's manager to let them know that one of their resources is being assigned to a project. This informs them of the projects your organization is undertaking that are drawing their resources.
- Require Approval of resources on projects by Resource Pool manager – Resources inside a Resource Pool that has this setting can still be added to a Project, but until that Resource Pool's manager approves the resource being added, the resource request will have a status of Pending on the project. If this setting were not applied, they would be added to the project immediately, and the resource request would have a status of Active on the project.
If the Resource Pool manager does not want a resource added to a project, they can deny the request or swap the requested resource for another. The swapped resource can then be added to the project.
Resource Pool managers will see a Manage Allocations tab in the Resource Management application that provides granular control over where their users are allocated.