Kelloo

When assigning a resource to a piece of work you can choose to assign either a resource or a role. 

Roles are things like Project Manager, Developer or Engineer. You can assign a role if you are not yet sure which resource will be doing the work.

Resources and roles

Here are some examples of resources and roles. Named resources must have a role defined for them, for resource groups this is optional. Learn more about the different ways you can set up resources.

When to assign a physical resource vs a role

There are two typical cases when you would choose to assign a role as opposed to a physical resource.

• You do not yet know which resource will be doing the work, but you do know the type of resource (i.e. the role) who needs to do the work. So you assign the role and at some point in the future may swap it for an actual resource. This means you can still keep track of the overall resource demands for the role.

• You do not need to plan at the level of resources - you are more concerned with planning roles to work. In this instance you can ignore the availability reporting at the resource level and just review the role level.

You can mix both approaches in the same plan and swap assignments between resource and role based.

How does Kelloo calculate availability when assigning a resource vs. a role?

When you assign work to a resource, the remaining availability of the resource reduces and the remaining availability of the role the resource is within reduces also. When you assign work to a role, the remaining availability of the role reduces.

Worked example

We have two Business Analysts Aarav who supplies 2.5 days per week labor and Karen who supplies 5 days per week labor. So the total supply of Business Analysts is 7.5 days.

This is how the availability would show in Kelloo before any work is assigned.

Then 2 days work is assigned to Karen so the availability of Karen reduces to 3 days and the availability of the Business Analysts role also reduces by 2 days also to 5.5 days.

Then 1 days work is assigned to the Business Analyst role. So the availability of Business Analysts reduces by 1 day to 4.5 days.

Then another 4.5 days work is assigned to the Business Analyst role . The Business Analyst role is now fully utilized.

Then another 4 days work is assigned to Karen so Karen is now 1 day over allocated and the Business Analysts role is now 4 days over allocated.