Forum Discussion
Generic Resources - Team Assignment Pool Yes or No?
In order for the team members to see the tasks assigned to the generic resource that represents their team, the Generic resource MUST be set up as a Team Assignment Pool. Keep in mind that your team members WILL NOT see the team tasks on their regular Tasks page. They MUST navigate to the Team Tasks page.
It's really not very easy or intuitive to use. The best I can tell you is to experiment with it to see if it is beneficial for your organization. Again, I wanted to stress to you that you are wading into waters into which view have ventured! HA! Good luck.
Brett --
It's been a long, long time since I used the Team resources and Team assignments in Project Online and Project Server. The first thing you need to do is to create a lookup table for the built-in Team Name field, such as Team Names, or something like that. Then you need to create a list of teams in the Team Names lookup table. Then you need to create a Generic resource that represents each team, and select the correct value in the Team Name field, and select the Team Assignment Pool checkbox. You will also need to specify a Team Name value for every resource as well. So, there is quite a bit of setup required to even get the thing working.
The Team assignments feature is meant to allow for "pick up work", where you assign a Generic resource to a task, and then members of the team represented by that resource can pick up the task and self-assign the task. To use the Team assignments feature, your organization will need to be using the Tasks page in PWA. On that page, your team members will need to click the Add Row pick list button in the Tasks ribbon, and then select the Add Team Tasks item on the pick list. The Team Tasks page will display a list of tasks assigned to their team, from which they can select one or more tasks, and click the Assign to Me button. These tasks will now appear on the Tasks page for that team member.
Believe me, it is plenty of work to set up for the app admin, but I think is it really clumsy for team members to use. In fact, I have never had a single client with either Project Server or Project Online use this feature. But if you want to try it out, go for it! Hope this helps.
Dale - thank you for responding. Fortunately (or unfortunately??), we already have the Team Names field set up with a lookup table, and each resource (generic and specific) is associated with a Team Name. The problem is, when a user logs into Project Server, they don't see the tasks assigned to their Team (i.e., a project engineer or engineering manager doesn't see tasks assigned to our generic project engineer resource). I believe this is because our generic resources are not Team resources. (Team Assignment Pool is unchecked).
My question is, instead of creating a separate "Team" resource for each labor category, could we simply make our generic resources a Team resource? This way, their tasks should be visible to Team Members, Team Leads, etc. on the same "Team". Is there a particular reason Generic resources would NOT be set up as a Team Assignment Pool? Does this affect availability/capacity planning views or other Project Server reporting?