Clarity

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  • 1.  Resource management and roles

    Posted Aug 19, 2019 05:04 PM
    Hello everyone, here is a situation that I am looking at.

         We have a geographically disperse organization, with different business segments and are looking at deploying resource management, including forecasting at the role level (both dollars and hours).  Here is where it gets complex:
    • single instance of Clarity
    • One entity
    • One currency
    • 10 resource calendars, each one with different shifts, and different holidays representing each region
    • 40 roles, each role can be junior, intermediate, or senior for a total of 120 roles
    • 24 business units each with their own rates for the roles
    Each business unit wants to use the same 40 roles, but wants them to reflect their calendar and rates so they can forecast.  In this case that would be 120 x 24, which is a nasty number of roles (ignoring the calendars).

    Has anyone seen anything like this in the past?  If so, what did you do?

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    Manager, PPM Strategy, Support and training
    TD bank Group
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  • 2.  RE: Resource management and roles

    Posted Aug 19, 2019 09:57 PM
    You should be able to leverage the 40 roles for planning and still allow various business units to use their own rates. This is something that can be easily achieved by a combination of the Staff OBS unit and Investment role attributes on the team. If the use case is simpler, just the staff obs may also suffice. You will need to look at the rate matrix in detail though, as the caveat there is that, as of now, it doesn't work hierarchically and as such you will have to educate your users to pick the appropriate levels (depending on how you setup the rate matrix) when populating the staff obs unit on the team.
    So in your example, you could have the junior/intermediate and senior as just THREE additional financially enabled roles. The users can then populate the Investment role field with one of these three and the staff OBS with their respective business units.

    Having them use their own calendars is where it might get tricky  and I am not sure you need that level of detail at an initial planning stage. Particularly if you are going to follow through from planning and eventually replace the roles with resources (the calendars they are tagged to can then be used to further refine the forecast).


  • 3.  RE: Resource management and roles

    Posted Aug 20, 2019 12:19 PM
    Can you explain in a little more detail?  I am trying to see how this would work as when you create the role you needs to enter the resource class and transaction class. The rate matrix does not allow for OBS affiliation.

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    Manager, PPM Strategy and Support
    TD Bank Group
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  • 4.  RE: Resource management and roles
    Best Answer

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Aug 20, 2019 01:47 PM
    The Rate Matrix allows for Department OBS Unit.
    If you have a ROLE on the team and you have a STAFF OBS Unit that is a 'Department OBS' unit it uses that OBS unit .... when populating the cost plan by Department OBS unit grouping attribute.
    If the ROLE's STAFF OBS Unit is blank or it uses an OBS unit that is not a Department OBS unit, then the cost plan will use the Project's Department OBS unit.
    If you want the STAFF OBS Unit to pre-populate with a value, set the Project DEFAULT RESOURCE OBS field --- this is useful in pre-populating the value with the resource's current OBS Unit from the same OBS Type used in the project default resource OBS field AT THE TIME THE RESOURCE IS STAFFED.
    For Example - If the Project DEFAULT RESOURCE OBS field is set to use the 'Corporate Department OBS' Type (any unit specified - let's say the top level = IT), and you add a resource to the team, if the resource already has a Department OBS Unit from Corporate Department OBS - Unit Level = Development, the resource will be added to the staff with the 'Development' Staff OBS Unit.

    Note: if you are using Department and Location OBS units in rate matrix for processing actual transactions you will also need to ensure you have the Administration, Finance WIP Settings configured to use RESOURCE Entity, Location and Department to get the rates you need.  There are a few KB articles on this subject.


  • 5.  RE: Resource management and roles

    Posted Aug 20, 2019 10:04 PM
    To add to what Kathryn has described in detail, here is how it can be setup in your example.

    You don't need to financially activate the 40 generic roles which I assume would be roles like Project Manager, Business Analyst etc.
    You only create 3 new ones ( junior/intermediate/senior) that have financial properties.
    Your map your 24 business units into the Department OBS and then setup the rate matrix with appropriate combinations of the 3 financially enabled roles and Department OBS.

    Users can then add the generic roles to project teams, update the Investment Role attribute with the financially enabled roles, and Staff OBS with the appropriate Business units. You can then forecast the dollars very easily, including using the Populate from Investment Team feature (even capitalization, potentially at a later date!).

    The benefit of this approach is you are leveraging standard product functionality, all across, which will ensure consistency in the outputs you get and not require you to build a lot of custom MI.

    The caveat is that the financially enabled roles are special purpose and your users will need to be aware of it.
    A lot of it can be handled via change management but you will want to setup the roles with names that are not only logical but also part of your organization's day to day jargon (particularly the finance guys) so that they register widely across the business, making training and new user on-boarding easier.