Project View

Though Resource View and Project View share the same planning data and many of the same capabilities, they provide different ways of working with data. Project View is designed with the project manager in mind, and with projects and opportunities as the focus.

In Project View, you can plan resources for both projects and opportunities. In the interest of brevity, however, the remainder of this topic only refers to projects. Unless otherwise noted, those references also apply to opportunities.

In Project View, you can:

• Search for and select the projects that you want to work on based on one or more attributes. For example, you might search based on primary client, project manager, or project type. If you create a search that you want to use again, save it so that you do not need to specify the search parameters again. DPS comes with some standard saved searches: Active (all active projects), All (all projects regardless of status), Projects I Manage (projects for which you are the project manager), and Organization (projects assigned to the same organization that you, as an employee, are assigned to).
• Review planned hours for the full life of the project and at any work breakdown structure level. Resource View is almost entirely forward-looking; it only displays calendar period hours for the current and any future periods. Project View, in contrast, gives you the option, for a project that is underway, to display planned hours by calendar period for the life of the project, for past periods as well as current and future periods.

  When you display a project in the grid, you can expand the work breakdown structure to display the lower-level work breakdown structure elements and, at the lowest level, the resource assignments themselves. For each resource, you can see the planned hours for the work breakdown structure element broken down into the calendar periods that you have specified for the grid. The hours for each calendar period roll up from the resource level to each of the work breakdown structure levels.

• Click an employee name to view extensive information about the employee on his or her Employee Card. When you drill down to the resource level in the Project View grid, the employee's name is a link to his or her Employee Card, as it is in Resource View. Along with basic profile information, the 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 hours the employee has charged to those projects.
• Assign resources to work on your projects. In the Assign Resources to Project dialog box, select one or more resources, locate one or more lowest-level work breakdown structure elements to which you want to assign those resources, and click + next to each of the selected work breakdown structure elements to make the assignments. Repeat those steps as many times as necessary, without closing the dialog box, to specify all of the assignments, and then click Assign to finalize them all at once.

  In addition to resources that you assign using the planning grids, employees with no planned hours but with actual job-to-date hours charged to a work breakdown structure element are assigned automatically as resources and display in the grids so that you can plan their participation on the project.

• Enter planned hours for individual assignments or enter summary hours for allocation to individual assignments. After you assign employees or generic resources to one or more work breakdown structure elements for a project, use the Project View grid to enter planned hours for those assignments:
  • Use the calendar period columns to enter planned hours for a resource assignment for specific days, weeks, or months. You can enter hours at the resource level or for any work breakdown structure element to which the resource is assigned at any level of the tree structure. If you enter hours in a calendar period column at a level of the work breakdown structure rather than at the resource level, DPS automatically allocates those hours to lower-level elements and to resources.
  • An alternative to entering planned hours calendar period by calendar period is to enter the sum of hours for a range of dates, let DPS allocate those hours across the calendar periods, and then make any necessary changes to fine-tune the plan.
• Soft book or hard book assignments. You can designate resource assignments as "soft" (tentative) or "hard" (confirmed or approved) to distinguish between tentative or placeholder resource assignments and those confirmed or approved assignments that you consider a permanent part of the plan. When you generate planning reports, you can filter reports to include or exclude assignments based on booking status. Use DPS security to control which users are allowed to hard book assignments.
• Enter notes for a work breakdown structure element in a plan. You can enter notes for any work breakdown structure element at any level of the structure. To enter or review notes for a work breakdown structure element in a plan, either click on the work breakdown structure element's grid row if no notes exist for the element or click if notes already exist.
• Move plans from opportunities to projects. If you do resource planning for an opportunity, are awarded the contract, and set up the project in DPS, you can move all or part of the plan that you set up for the opportunity into the project plan. First inactivate or close the opportunity. DPS displays a prompt with a link to display the opportunity plan in Project View and gives you the option to delete the plan or move it. Select the portions of the opportunity plan work breakdown structure that you want to move into the project plan. IThe move includes assignment start and end dates and all planned hours.
• Adjust plans. If you enter assignments for resources and later need to make changes, you can:
  • Add or delete assignments.
  • Change or remove planned hours for individual calendar periods.
  • Reschedule assignments or plans. Shift dates while preserving the same number of working days or 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).
• Change the Project View grid to get exactly the view you want. Set up the grid in a way that works best for you:
  • Use the Change Scale dialog box to specify the duration of each calendar period in the grid: week, month, or a combination of days and months. This last option displays plan data by day for one or two months, with the rest of the project plan displayed by month. If you select this option, specify the month or months for which you want to display plan data by day.
  • 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). Use the Column Settings & Selections dialog box to select the columns that you want to see in that section. You can also hide the middle section when you want to provide more space to view calendar period columns.
  • Use the Column Settings & Selections dialog box to indicate whether you want to sort resources in the grid based on name or on assignment start date.