We are happy to announce that starting today, you can create resource plans for your projects and resources in PPM Express. On each Project Details page, you will find the Resource Plan section, where you can add work, cost, and material resources to your project. Resource planning helps project managers organize their teams, allocate resources more effectively, track utilization, and manage their planned assignments.
Let’s look into PPM Express resource planning functionality I detail.
Calendar
We introduced enterprise Calendar Settings. On this page, you can customize the default work schedule for your organization, including the default work week and the workday’s length.
You can also specify Calendar exceptions to exclude national holidays, company holidays, etc. It is important to specify all the calendar exceptions for the correct calculation of resource capacity and hence, proper resource planning.
PPM Express task management is also utilizing Calendar exceptions. For example, if you set up the dependency between two tasks, and the due date of the predecessor’s task is right before the national holiday, which has been added to the Calendar exceptions, the dependent task will start one day later.
Resource Calendars and exceptions will be added later this quarter.
Adding & Allocating Resources
Before you can allocate resources, the first thing you need is to build a resource pool . You can either create new resources directly from PPM Express or import the existing resources from the external systems connected to PPM Express. Either way, all the resources you created or imported will be equally available for allocation to your projects.
You can easily find the needed resource using a global search by name, role, or email. It is recommended to allocate the resource within its current availability, which is calculated automatically based on the Calendar and maximum capacity of the given resource. As soon as you add the needed resources to your project, you will see them in the Resource Plan section.
Learn more about resource allocation
Resource Utilization
To control how your team members are booked for the given time frame, PPM Express provides the Resource Utilization section, available on each Resource Details page, as well as on the Resources Dashboard. It shows whether your entire team or specific employees are fully booked, if some of them are overloaded or, on the opposite, do not have enough tasks. You can identify all these “bottlenecks” by the timeline color of the given resource:
- green/grey – the resource allocation is within its capacity;
- yellow – the total allocation of the resource for the given period doesn’t exceed its capacity, but the resource is over-allocated on specific days;
- red – the resource is booked above its capacity for the given period.
It makes project planning and resource management easier and helps you get the most out of your team’s existing capacity.
As soon as you reviewed the resource utilization information, you can start planning your team right away using the Team Planner module. It allows you to define the number of hours (or % FTE) of selected resources to be allocated, and to which projects. In the Team Planner, you can see how many hours a day resources spend on each project they are working on and change these values without having to “jump” between projects.
Learn more about resource utilization
New Power BI Reports
During this release we’ve updated the PPM Express Power BI Reports Pack and added two new reports:
- Resource Management Overview, where you can access summary information about the resources in your organization.
- Resource Details, which shows availability for each resource and detailed resource plan for the given period.
We are very excited to present this new functionality to you and appreciate your feedback, which is of utmost importance to us. We keep working hard adding more features to the Resource Management, including Personal Calendars, Scheduled Work and Actual Work view, Assignment views and more. Stay tuned and prepare for more good news this year!