Resource Pool

Hi there, this overview -https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/workfront/using/manage-resources/resource-planning-in-adobe-workfront/resource-pools/work-with-resource-pools.html?lang=en  - gives some examples of how pools can be used, as well as links to learn more. I personally don’t use pools because we tend to use job role and user home group or team instead, but that’s how our org works best. A pool can include people across multiple teams/groups/roles, just need to decide what’s best for your instance. 

I don't know much about resource pools but am endlessly fascinated by them so will be following this thread to pick up more knowledge if I can.

From what I was able to pick up though, the number 1 thing is, if you want to use the resource planner functionality then you have to use resource pools. If you don't want to use it, then you can ignore resource pools.

We mostly create teams for two purposes. One is to assign work to the team; the other is to tag the team in notifications. If you're creating a team specifically to indicate "here is a group of users who all get assigned to the same projects", then this isn't really a good use of the teams object -- at least, not for us -- because it would clutter up our tagging list (they would get accidentally tagged all the time), and people might try and assign that team a task. Similarly, we use groups to represent our company's org structure. We wouldn't put users in a group in order to indicate a resource pool, for exactly that reason -- often the users in a resource pool come from different org units, so for us, to have different org members in the same group just looks weird.

As an example -- our internal creative department has a set of people that work on their web-related creative materials (e.g. websites) and a different set that work on everything else. This has led to a proliferation of roles, like Copywriter vs Copywriter-Web, Designer vs Designer-Web, and so on. If I understand correctly, we could conceivably have gone with just a Copywriter and Designer role and put the users in a web resource pool and an everything-else resource pool, one to attach to our web templates and one to attach to everything else. This would save us from having double the number of roles to maintain. Hoping that my thinking is correct here.

PS: Randomly sticking users in teams and groups for "no reason" can also mess with our reporting, especially if that team ends up being a user's home team or home group by mistake.

Over the last few months I have been trying to wrap my head around resource pools and Planner. Like @kelliegardner and others, we are struggling—a lot. Once I think I have a solution, something else comes up. So far here's what I've learned:

• In a couple webinars about the resourcing tools over the summer, the product team insisted that resource pools are required to ultimately make Planner work, but it was unclear why. I'm still trying to get a good answer, however, when we didn't have resource pools attached to projects, those projects were missing from Planner—even if we weren't using the resource pools filter.
• Knowing that projects need to have resource pools to persuade Planner to deliver complete data, I now have a protocol to manually check for projects that don't have the requisite resource pools. To do this, I have a filter in my Projects area to help me identify the projects in certain portfolios that need x resource pool(s). Why am I doing this and not asking others? Because we're still trying to figure out the sweet spot of what these resource pools should look like. If I had to ask my project owners to take on decision-making around adding resource pools to their projects, they'd mutiny. So I need some serious governance first. Even then, I think I would recommend a dedicated resource manager assign resource pools because this is just so complicated.
• So what should your resource pools look like? Like I said, I'm still trying to figure that out, but it sure is complicated. This was another question that came up during those resourcing webinars and the product team struggled to provide more specific guidance. A single resource pool that includes everyone is one of the easiest ways to go, but yields a ton of extraneous data in Planner. For us, we hit the row limit so quickly and therefore have to apply a dozen or so filters to export all the data. Here's one example I can give you: I have a Creative team and then I have a small number of freelancers who fill in when work overflows beyond the Creative team's capacity. However, in our Workfront instance, we have a bunch of other freelancers and agencies. When project owners and resource managers are allocating resources, we want to ensure they choose the right Creative or freelance Creative. Additionally, when we're doing capacity planning, we want the numbers to reflect availability of only Creative and freelance Creative. Thus we have two resource pools (Creative and Freelance Creative) that includes only those users and are attached to the zillion projects that might use those folks. I dread having to scale and adapt this model for other teams because I envision the number of resource pools quickly growing out of control.