Our IT PMO is launching a process for IT project budget management and reporting using Workfront. This includes labor hours, labor cost, and expense, as well as budget, plan, and actual for each.
Each IT role has been set with an hourly rate.
We had been using one large companywide resource pool, and teams have been using Planner to manage resources - availability, planned, and actual hours.
Having only one large companywide resource pool presented a couple challenges.
First, when entering a resource labor budget within the Resource Budgeting section of the Business Case, a long list of companywide roles was listed, making it very unwieldy for a project manager to enter budgeted hours. Having only 3 months to enter data didn't help. This would require a lot of scrolling and page turning.
Second, only IT roles have rates. Adding a budget to a role that doesn't have a rate would translate to $0.
Therefore, it was advantageous to create an IT-only resource pool, assign that pool to the project, and remove the companywide resource pool. By doing so, the Resource Budgeting list was much shorter as it was limited to IT resources only, and when entering budgeted hours at the project level, Workfront distributed the hours across IT roles only ensuring all hours calculated a labor cost.
After reading this communities comments on resource pools, it seems they are a bit of a mystery. It's good to know I'm not alone. I thought I would share this information as a good use case for resource pools. On the other hand, I'm a bit nervous about any unforeseen impacts of removing the companywide resource pool from the project and replacing it with the IT-only resource pool. It doesn't seem to impact having the ability to add task assignments to resources outside of the IT-only resource pool, so that's good.
Does anyone have any thoughts of potential impacts we should be aware of? Thanks in advance.
