Adding resources provides the following benefits:
Control who can log time and expenses to the task
Provides project specific forecast resource utilisation analysis and contribute towards overall staff company utilisation, thus:
Ensuring you have enough staff to complete work you have committed to
Ensuring all staff are fully utilised and working on the right projects
Ensure user, department and company wide staff target utilisations are being achieved
Validate budgeted costs and subsequent profit margin on fixed fee projects against billing agreements and forecast costs of resource time
Track the actual time of a project against initial forecasts, thus helping to better plan future project work
Resources can be added to a project via either Projects > Project > Work Structure or Projects > Project > Gantt.
The process for adding resources to a project task are the same whether completed via the Work Structure or Gantt screens.
To get to the point where you can start resourcing:
Open the required project and go to the Work Structure page.
Click on the task sequence number for the task you wish to add resources to.
Open the required project and go to the Gantt page.
Click on the gantt bar for the task you wish to add resources to.
There are three different types of task categorisation:
Non-Effort Driven should be used when you want to fix a task start and end date, and assign resources within these two dates.
If you do not want to
fix task start and end dates, you can use the task type Accumulated Work, which will
update the start or end date based on the task constraint selected
and resource assignments made.
This is sometimes referred to as critical
path resourcing, as the worker with the longest resource
assignment guides the task start or end date.
Alternatively, you can
use Calendared resourcing
which will set task start and end dates purely on resource assignments
made.
The earliest resource assignment will set the start date, the latest
resource assignment will set the end date.
The table below provides different scenarios and advises on the most suitable task type to use.
Scenario |
Use Task Type |
I know when my task must start and finish, and I need to assign resources to complete the work between these two dates. |
Non Effort Driven |
I know when my task must start or finish, I know how many days I want to spend on the task, and I need to assign resources to complete the work within this time period. |
Non-Effort Driven |
I know when my task must start, and I need to calculate how quickly it can finish based on the staff I need to resource to it. |
Accumulated Work |
I know when my task must finish, and I need to calculate how soon it must start based on the staff I need to resource to it. |
Accumulated Work |
I have agreed specific dates where work must be completed. This work is spread over multiple dates and must take place on these dates. |
Calendared |
I am using resourcing for cost based forecasting only, the task dates are not important. |
Accumulated Work |
See the following topics for detailed information on how to resource using the three available task types.
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