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Use Resourcing Groups in Capacity planning

Capacity Planning is an interactive workspace for creating “what if” scenarios and providing insights at a glance to help you avoid overestimating capacity and over committing resources. You can get a full picture of your organization's capacity versus demand, with full visibility into your teams' availability, so that you can better plan and optimize the assignment of resources across projects.

The Capacity planning view allows Project Managers and Resource/Portfolio Managers to:

  • Request, update, and approve staffing requests by job title, user groups, or users 
  • View capacity vs demand
  • Assign resources directly on projects based on current availability and assignments
  • Plan and forecast utilization of resources for future tasks

In order to use User Groups in the Capacity Planning view, you need to set the user group as a Resourcing Group, define which resources will be taken into account for the demand, and set who in your organization will be able to update, approve staffing requests, and assign resources to projects. 

 

Note: Assets and Asset type resources are not supported in Capacity planning scenarios

Enabling Resourcing Groups 

You can define which of your user groups to include in the Capacity Planning module. For example, if your projects are R&D related, include all R&D groups, but exclude the Finance group, as they are not relevant to your projects, and should not appear in the Capacity Planning module as available resources.

To enable a Resource Group:

  1. From the main navigation panel, select User Groups.
  2. Select the List View (default view).
  3. Click the gear icon and select Columns. Add Resourcing Group to the list of selected columns.
  4. For each group that you want to enable, toggle the Resourcing Group option ON.

Defining the Primary Group for Resources 

A resource can belong to multiple user groups, however only one group can be used for resource allocation in Capacity Planning. On the Group level, a group includes group members, of which only some are Primary users, and therefore will be available for resource allocation in Capacity Planning.

To enable a Primary Group for resources:

  1. From the main navigation panel, select User Groups.
  2. Open a User Group and go to the Group Members panel.
  3. Click the gear icon and click Columns. Add Primary to your selected columns.
  4. For each team member, toggle the Primary option ON.

Note: To preserve the hierarchy with the parent group, the sub-group must be defined as the primary group in the parent group (in addition to being a Resourcing Group). This will ensure the Resource Manager of the parent group keeps control of the resources in the sub-group, and capacity for the parent group includes the sub-group(s).

Assigning the Resource Manager Role 

The Resource Manager can update and approve requests, and assign resources to projects. You can have multiple Resource Managers per user group. In the Capacity Planning module, the Resource Manager will only be able to see groups of which he/she is Resource Manager. Note that the Direct Manager of the group automatically gets the Resource Manager role of the group and its sub-groups if they exist.

To assign the Resource Manager role:

  1. From the main navigation panel, select User Groups.
  2. Select the List View (default view).
  3. Click the gear icon and then select Columns. Add Resource Managers to the list of selected columns.
  4. Add Resource Managers to groups as needed.