Assignments Overview
This article provides an introduction to the labor and financial assignment pages.
Overview
There are two primary types of assignments in ResourceFirst: Labor and Financial.
An assignment defines an object as a relationship between a project and one of three other objects;
a resource,
a node-skill, or
a node-financial item.
The first two are found as rows on the Labor Assignments page, the third on the Financial Assignments page.
Assignments have fields such as State, Country, Location, custom (User Defined) fields and time period related values. Assignment rows on the page can also have “mapped” fields; fields from the project or resource object in the assignment object on that row.
Labor assignment period values can be for a specific person (resource) or for a skill needed from a specified node in the OBS (Organization Breakdown Structure).
Financial Assignments period values are currency by time period for a specific financial item from a specified node in the OB.
Mapped Fields
The screenshot below shows the Selected Columns pane of the Edit View dialog to illustrate including “mapped” fields in an assignment view.
Labor Assignments
On Resource assignments, the OBS node is fixed since people are members of one and only one resource OBS node.
On Skill assignments the resource OBS node defines the range of resources from which a person with the Required skill is needed. A Skill assignment is defined by the absence of a resource name.
Labor assignments are viewed and managed on the following pages:
Assignments (all assignments in the data load)
Individual Project Workspace > Assignments (assignments for a specific project)
Individual Resource Workspace > Assignments (assignments for a specific resource)
PMO > Assignment Rollup (read only)
Home > Personal Forecast (assignments for the current user)
A user with appropriate rights can add or delete assignments and can edit attributes (fields) including period demand values.
See the remaining articles in this series for details on the features available on the Labor Assignment pages.
Understanding the Analysis Indicators (color codes)
The colors on the period values are the result of the ResourceFirst prioritized resource availability analysis, and are as follows:
- Yellow/orange/red shows the assignments that cannot be completely filled, assuming all assignments are addressed in priority order with the available capacity of the resource/skill.
- Yellow means a small amount of the assignment cannot be filled.
- Orange means a moderate amount of the assignment can’t be filled.
- Red means a large amount of the assignment can’t be filled.
- Skill assignments also show in red until they are filled with a named resource.
The color thresholds are set by the administrator for all users. See Server Settings and General Defaults for how to change the thresholds.
Note that the colors do not necessarily indicate the degree of the resource’s over-utilization (for that, you need to go to the Utilization page). Rather, they indicate how much of an assignment cannot be filled by the resource, given their availability. So if you have an assignment for the resource for a given period that is for 1 FTE (full time), then all subsequent assignments for that resource in that period will be RED, because the resource is at capacity and cannot fill any part of other assignments.
In contrast, if you have an assignment for the resource for .50 (half) of an FTE, and then you assign them to another project in the same period for .60 of an FTE, then the second project will be YELLOW because they can only fill .50 of the required .60 FTEs for that second project. In other words, the colors indicate how much of an assignment can be filled by the resource, given their other assignments and their capacity.
NOTE: With Optimization turned off (Use Availability for Skill Assignments is unchecked), skill assignments always appear in RED because they need to be filled. However, if you have Optimization turned on (Use Availability for Skill Assignments is checked), you will see the Yellow/Orange/Red colors for skill assignments based on the degree to which unused capacity with that skill is able to satisfy the demand.
Labor Assignments Screen Tour
The screenshot below shows the Labor Assignments page, accessed from the Resources or Project application toolbar icons.
All assignments in the current data load are available on this page. User controlled filters determine which of the assignments are visible on the page.
Assignment page function icons are located in the top grey page toolbar.
They are from left to right:
- Add icon – add resource or skill assignment
- Copy Assignment icon
- Delete Assignment icon
- Add to Scenario button – add assignments to a project scenario
- Request icon – submit assignments as a request to the resource manager
- Convert to Skill drop down – convert demand or shortfall on a resource assignment to a skill assignment
- Candidates button – find candidate resources to replace another assignment
- Options drop down –
- Show Header Rows
- Define the method of allocation and optimization calculation
- Show Team Assignments
- Filter Drop Downs by Availability
See the article Filter Labor Assignment Resource Lists by Resource OBS for more.
- Filters icon
- Calculate Allocations icon – recalculate and refresh the colors after period data changes
- View selection drop down and Edit Views icon
- Save icon
- Import/Export icons
- Legend icon – for period data color thresholds
- Value Type drop down – select values to display in the period data grid
List of Labor Assignment Articles
For more on Labor Assignments, see the following articles:
Viewing Assignment Value Types
Managing View and Columns on the Assignments Page
