This is a brand new module we are excited to launch this month, allowing you to view interactive resource loads on your employees, contractors and teams. You can decide which projects and tasks are part of resource planning through a checkbox on project and task type settings (resource planning & utilization). Estimated or remaining effort (for tasks which have started) are timephased over working hours of each task’s duration to calculate a combined utilization factor for each resource over each upcoming day, week or month. The Resource Planning application available in our standard menu under “Projects” allows you to view graphical load by team member or team, color coded to represent over/under utilization and showing in each time period for each resource either the combined % utilization, total required hours in that period or remaining available hours in that period.

• Planned absences or leaves automatically reduce available capacity as compared to each person’s work-schedule.
• Team resource loads are dynamically calculated by combining and summing up tasks assigned to team members as well as tasks directly assigned to the team. That way you can assign tasks to teams initially and then as they get closer re-assign them to specific members of that team without impacting the team’s workload.
• You can view time periods in days, weeks or months and move forwards or backwards in time.

Finally showing color-coded load profiles (red for overloaded or 100%+ vs. yellow for under-utilized or potentially on the bench) would be of little benefit if you could not modify work assignments from within the same report. Clicking on the wrench in each cell gives a view of the tasks making up each person’s load for your selected projects or customers, with options to delete or add work-assignments, modify planned effort or utilzation for a given resource on a task and in the near future, modify start or end dates of a task. Date modifications will impact all resources assigned to the same task.