Assign work to resources

Assign resources to project designations, allocate weekly hours, and manage deliverables on WBS projects.

After setting up the project schedule, you can assign resources to the various designations on the project.

Tip: Resources can also be assigned to designations before adding hours on the schedule. This lets you see how many hours can be added for a specific employee, since the schedule view then warns when capacity is exceeded.

Understand the resources view

The columns of the resource table, numbered above, are as follows:

1. Designation: The name of the designation, as specified in the project organogram during project setup.
2. PM: A checkbox that enables a user to act as a project manager on this project. Selecting it brings up three further options:
   1. Project Manager: Reflects the selection of the parent checkbox.
   2. View Financials: Lets the user view financial information on the project, such as rates, and access potentially sensitive documents uploaded in the Documents tab.
   3. Email notifications: Determines whether the project manager receives project notifications by email. This is useful when, for example, a project director has delegated project management to another user and does not want the email updates, since they already go to the delegated project manager.
3. HM: Short for hour management. When enabled, it prevents resources from capturing more hours on a project than have been allocated to them. This is especially helpful when, for example, contractors on a project should work only a fixed number of hours and should consult the project manager before logging more.
4. Project Rate: The charge-out rate for this designation on this project, including any discounts configured in the organogram.
5. Total Hours: The total number of hours allocated for this designation on this project.
6. Allocated user: The user allocated to this designation.
7. Actions: The ⋯ menu holding Unallocate and Archive, described under take a resource off a project. It is only shown to users who can update the project.

Assign users to project roles

Consult gives project managers a quick indicator of whether a user is available to fulfil a role.

A green checkmark indicates that the user has the required number of hours for the selected role:

A red cross indicates that the user does not have enough capacity for this project given their current schedule. You can still select that user, which sends a request to their resource manager to approve or reject.

Tip: Find out who the user’s resource manager is using the company organogram, and notify them of the request with context on why the user is needed. This can speed up approval. The resource manager can move the user’s hours around to free up capacity for the project.

Take a resource off a project (archive or unallocate)

When someone comes off a project, the resources table offers two actions from the ⋯ menu at the end of their row:

• Archive: Marks the resource as inactive on the project and keeps everything already captured against them. Use this when the work is finished or has moved to someone else, but the history still matters for reporting and invoicing.
• Unallocate: Removes the person from the designation but keeps the designation itself, along with its forecast hours, on the project. Use this when the role is still needed and someone else will fill it.

Archiving is reversible, and it does not affect the person’s own access to Consult or to the project. Removing a resource from the project organogram, by contrast, deletes the resource and discards its hours, so archive it instead whenever the history should be kept.

Tip: Archive rather than delete whenever a resource has already worked, been forecast, or been invoiced on the project. Deleting cannot be undone.

Anyone who can update the project can archive a resource on it.

To archive a resource:

1. From the project overview page, open the Resources tab.
2. Click the ⋯ menu at the end of the resource’s row.
3. Click Archive.
4. Confirm the action in the Archive Resource dialog, which asks “Are you sure you want to archive the selected project resource?”.

The row is greyed out and marked with an Archived badge, which shows the date it was archived when hovered over. To reverse it, follow the same steps and click Unarchive.

Archiving keeps the resource’s forecast hours, actual hours, invoiced hours, rate, and approval history exactly as they were. What changes is that the resource can no longer be forecast or captured against:

• The resource stays visible on the schedule, greyed out, and its cells can no longer be edited.
• The resource stays visible on the timesheet, greyed out, and capturing hours against it is refused with “This project resource has been archived.”.
• The resource is left out of schedule generation, baselines, hours rollover, schedule imports, and Gantt editing.
• The resource still appears on an invoice if it contributed hours, but no new empty lines are created for it.

Note: Archiving stops new planning from here on, it does not remove hours that were already forecast. A project’s forecast and utilisation figures continue to include an archived resource’s existing hours.