Resource View

Resource View is designed as the center of activity for those who approach planning from a resource management perspective. The normal workflow in Resource View starts with, and focuses on, your resources, either individually or in groups.

In Resource View, you can do the following:

• Search for and select the employees and generic resources you want to work on, based on one or a combination of attributes. For example, you might search based on the need for specific skills, education and training, or professional credentials.

  If you create a search that you will want to use again, you can save it so you do not need to specify the search parameters again. And Deltek comes with some standard saved searches: All Resources, All Employees (excludes generic resources), Generic Resources (excludes employees), Employees I Supervise (employees for whom you are the supervisor), and Resources in My Organization (employees and generic resources assigned to the same organization you are assigned to as an employee).

• "Pin" selected resources while you run additional searches. If you need to do multiple searches to assemble the group of resources you want, you can "pin" those you want to retain from one search while you do subsequent searches. Deltek saves all pinned resources so you can easily retrieve them later.
• Click an employee name to view extensive information about the employee on his or her Employee Card. Along with basic profile information, Employee Card displays an employee's skills and credentials; all of the employee's assignments that have planned hours remaining; and a list of the employee's current and past projects with a summary of the actual job-to-date (JTD) hours the employee has charged to those projects.
• Assemble a team of resources that you want to plan for as a group (a project management team, for example). After you select the resources in the Resource View grid, you can save them as a saved search so you can easily display them in Resource View in the future.
• Review a resource's current and future assignments in the Resource View grid. When you display a resource in the grid, you can expand the resource row to display the projects and lower-level work breakdown structure (WBS) elements to which the resource is assigned. For each WBS element, you can see the resource's planned hours for that element broken down into the calendar periods you have specified for the grid. Hours roll up from the assignment-level WBS elements to higher WBS levels.
• Evaluate an employee's current and future capacity. In addition to planned hours, you can also display the following, by calendar period, to help you assess an employee's current and future workload:
  • Schedule percentage: Planned hours for the calendar period / Total available hours for the calendar period. Cell background color indicates schedule status: gray (properly scheduled), yellow (under-scheduled), red (over-scheduled).
  • Utilization percentage: Billable planned hours for the calendar period / Total available hours for the calendar period. (Billable hours are hours planned for projects that are assigned the Regular charge type.) Cell background color indicates utilization status: gray (properly utilized), yellow (under-utilized), red (over-utilized).

  On the Resource Settings tab of the Resource Planning Settings form, you define the thresholds that determine whether a given schedule percentage or utilization percentage is over or under the desired range.

• Assign resources to work on current projects or prospective projects (opportunities). You can select a single resource in the Resource View grid to assign that resource to work on a project or you can select multiple resources and work with them as a group as you add assignments. If you set up plan structures for opportunities, you can assign resources to them in Resource View, just as you do for projects.

  In addition to resources that you assign using the planning grids, employees with no planned hours but with actual JTD hours charged to a WBS element are assigned automatically as resources and display in the grids as well, immediately ready for you to plan their participation on the project.

• Assign generic resources as placeholders while you work on your resource plan. Resource planners may not know initially which employees will staff a project, particularly prospective projects. Generic resources enable a planner to assign a placeholder for a type of employee without having to select an actual person, while they determine whether to fill staffing needs with existing employees or to hire new staff for the project. To implement the option to use generic resources, define the resources on the Generic Resources form in the desktop application (Settings > Resource Planning > Generic Resources) and link each of them to a labor category or labor code so that Deltek can calculate planned amounts for them.
• Enter planned hours for individual assignments or enter summary hours for allocation to individual assignments. After you assign an employee or generic resource to one or more WBS elements for a project or an opportunity, you can use the Resource View grid to enter planned hours for that resource:
  • Use the calendar period columns to enter planned hours for a resource assignment for specific days, weeks, or months. You can enter hours for any WBS element to which the resource is assigned and at any level of the tree structure. If you enter hours in a calendar period column at a level of the WBS other than the lowest level, Deltek automatically allocates those hours to lower-level elements.
  • An alternative to entering planned hours calendar period by calendar period is to enter the sum of hours for a range of dates (for example, the entire assignment date range), let Deltek allocate those hours across the calendar periods, and then make any necessary changes to fine tune the plan.
• Soft book or hard book assignments. When you set up Deltek, you can turn on the option to designate resource assignments as "soft" (tentative) or "hard" (confirmed or approved). This feature enables you to distinguish between preliminary or placeholder resource assignments and those assignments that you consider a permanent part of the plan. When you generate planning reports, you can filter those reports to include or exclude assignments based on booking status. Through Deltek security, you control which users are allowed to hard book assignments.
• Adjust plans. If you enter assignments for resources and later need to make changes you can do any of the following in either Project View or Resource View:
  • Add or delete assignments.
  • Change or remove planned hours for calendar periods.
  • Reschedule assignments or plans. You can choose to shift dates while preserving the same number of working days, or you can change the duration of an assignment or plan.
  • Reassign an assignment, or part of an assignment, from one resource to another (for example, from a generic resource to an employee).
• Manipulate the Resource View grid to get exactly the view you want. As you work in Resource View, you can do the following to set up the grid in a way that works best for you:
  • Using the Change Forecast Period dialog box, you can specify the number of calendar period columns in the Resource View grid, the duration of each period (day, week, or month), and the starting period.
  • The middle section of the grid can contain any of a variety of summary data columns (for example, Total Planned Hours or Total ETC Hours) and date columns (for example, Assignment Start and Assignment End). In the Column Settings & Selections dialog box, you select the columns you want to see in the middle grid section. You can also easily hide that section when you want to provide more space to view calendar period columns.
  • Also in the Column Settings & Selections dialog box, you can select options for grouping the grid rows (by organization, for example) and options for sorting both resource rows within the grid and the project rows under each resource.