Using Roles and the Resource Planner

[MikePe]

Hi everyone! Long-time reader, first time poster here, I love the enthusiasm I've seen in this community and look forward to becoming more involved myself. I've tried searching for my answer but couldn't find anything that quite covered the specifics, so I would like to ask you all for input. I recently took on the role of admin for our Workfront instance, and we are currently evaluating our instance to determine what steps we need to take to be able to start using the Resource Planner. The WF Support site has been of great help, but one area I was looking for further assistance on is the use of Roles. Right now, we have multiple brands, and multiple Designer roles based on brand ("Brand_A Designer", "Brand_B Designer", etc). I believe this was done for the sake of the resource pools, because our designers work on specific brands only and there was a concern that if we just used "Designer" as a role, that the resource would be shared across all projects. But to my understanding, that should not be happening as long as the user is only part of one resource pool. To put it another way, I would like to confirm if my current understanding of the tool is correct: Jonny Drawstuff is a designer for Brand_A. He is assigned the role "Designer" and is in the Brand_A resource pool. Susie Artist is a designer for Brand_B, and is assigned the role "Designer" in the Brand_B pool. If we look at an unassigned project in the resource planner, the AVL, PLN and so on for Designer should only look at Jonny's hours for projects associated with the Brand_A resource pool, even though we have two users with the Designer role, right? If this is true, then I am right in thinking we should not be using multiple brand-specific versions of each role, but should let the resource pools dictate who is available for which projects? Likewise, if we are making assignments to a project using the Scheduling tool and a template with roles assigned to the tasks, the users that populate on the Scheduling tool should be limited to the pool that is associated with the project, right? The only remaining question then would be for users that are part of multiple brands: should they be included in each brand resource pool? Or should we have a separate pool that gets assigned to every project? I would love to hear any additional thoughts or perspectives I may not have even considered regarding best practices for groups and roles as well. Thank you for your time reading this wall of text :) Mike Perez Tailored Brands

[Exp_-_VazgenBa]

Hi Mike, The Resource Planner calculates availability off the users in the project's Resource Pools. So if a project only has Brand_A Resource Pool, the AVL for that project will only consider Jonny Drawstuff. If the project has both Brand_A and Brand_B resource pools, both Johnny and Susie will be considered for AVL calculations. The best practice recommendation for the Resource pool mapping is for it to reflect the way the work is organized. So if you have dedicated groups of users working with specific brands, mapping that to Resource Pool structure should be the best course of action. Thanks, Vazgen Babayan Product Manager Workfront

[Dr_DougWi]

In general, resource planning is often a complex component of all work management science. I have seen many people go grey or bald from some of the frustrations that the underlying mathematics present. Testing out the "how to" for your situation offers the opportunity to understand the multi-dimensional, multi-variant array that is inherent to all resource management solutions. Literally, there are hundreds of potential assemblies that will work, but "best practice" is a matter of your situation, user precision, and accuracy tolerance. You will need to consider the interactions of the following Workfront items in getting to your "best use" Workfront scenario. General Settings Company Schedules Groups Teams Job Roles Users Resource Pools Portfolio - Program - Project Structures Projects - Standard Settings and Usage Tasks - Standard Settings and Usage Issues - Standard Settings and Usage Resource Manager Specificity Resource Management Tool The support area of Workfront offers several articles for how to use the resource planner tools. They are very nicely done. As always, contact me by message for more help on this and other topics. Doug Williams Working to balance how technology supports the integration of people and process.

[AnthonyIm]

For The only remaining question then would be for users that are part of multiple brands: should they be included in each brand resource pool? Or should we have a separate pool that gets assigned to every project? This is where it gets tricky. If the user is in both resource pools, it takes their entire available for both resource pools. Example: I'm in Brand A and Brand B, for the week, both resource pools would see me as 40 hours available. If you are allocating people like 40% on Brand A and 60% on Brand B, having two separate roles is better for that. Because then when you look at resource planner my available hours for Brand A would only be 16. Make sense? Anthony Imgrund FCB

[MikePe]

Thank you all for the responses, this is all very helpful info! @Vazgen Babayan Thank you, that explanation is perfect! @Doug Williams I've definitely gotten a few grey hairs since I started all this! Thanks for the item checklist, that will prove very useful as I analyze our current setup. @Anthony Imgrund , that explanation is very clear and does make sense, but I have one question regarding the scenario you described, where being in the Brand A and Brand B pools will show you as having 40 hours in each. If a user that is in both pools is assigned, say, 4 hours of work to a Brand A project, will it show 36 hours for Brand A AVL and 40 for Brand B? Or does it update both to now show 36 remaining in both? I assume it's the latter, because the user's capacity is still only 40 total for the week, but I would like to confirm just in case :) Mike Perez Tailored Brands

[AnthonyIm]

Available is based of FTE, Holidays, pay off (if you are using out-of-the-box), etc. So Available will always be 40. The Planned hours are what will change. So if you are filtering from Brand A resource pool, my planned hours would be 4 hours but my available would still be 40. For Brand B, my available is 40 hours but my planned hours would be zero. Anthony Imgrund FCB