Capacity Planning for Resources with multiple roles

[John Kusar]

Hello,
I'm interested in how some other companies are handling capacity (availability) of staff when they may have multiple roles.  Today, we are using the primary role and forcing that person to one team and one team only.  The problem is, it does not accurately show the demand on the right role.  

I know you can change the role on the project, but, then the Capacity vs Demand by Role report does not have the right numbers for the role.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
John

[John Kusar]

The big part of this will be how to handle capacity planning.  Availability only shows to the primary role or is there another way?

[Garrett Steudle]

Places I've worked at people have "multiple" roles, however their capacity is based off the role they were hired or promoted to do, ie their Primary role. 

Not knowing your exact situation a couple things come to mind:
1.  You simply don't have enough resources therefore people have to perform multiple roles.  For example, I'm a system admin but for one project I'm acting as the BA because we don't have a BA. However I will still be System admin on the project and the project will have a BA role that doesn't have a named resource. That's where your Capacity and demand by role will show you simply don't have the right amount of resources.  The report can show a demand for a BA role but no capacity.

2.  Are your roles in Clarity too specific and do they need to become more generic or high level?


Garrett

[John Kusar]

Thank you Garrett.

Our roles are the team they are on.  The problem is, we have some resources that have responsibilities for multiple teams.  What I'm hoping to do is show they have availability of 20 hours on team A, 10 hours on team B, and 10 hours on team C.  We can change the role on the project so the actuals line up, but we cannot change the allocation to show it is for a specific team.  Or I should say, I do not know how to show that for a specific team.

[Ming Cheung]

Hi John,

In general, when defining a resource's primary role, I describe it as the role in which the resource brings the most value to the organization so that we can maximize the value generated by our resources by maximizing their utilization.

I'd be interested to see how you define your teams.  Are they fixed teams that are assigned work as a group?  If they are, then you may want to consider exploring our Clarity's Teams functionality which allows you to assign groups of individuals to work.  You can define the % Allocation of resources to the team, which defines the team's overall capacity.  One of my colleagues has a talk scheduled this month around the use of teams: Explore Clarity Teams