Best Practices for Resource Management through Capacity planning and Resource engagement

[MayurPode]

Hello All,

I'm currently exploring Capacity planning and Resource engagement functionalities in Project Online and have got following two part question:

Since Project Online doesn't offer OOB fields for skills and degree of expertise (please correct me if I'm wrong), what's the best practice to categorize resources based on skills and degree of expertise and use this information for :

#1: matching against generic resources (in Project Professional/Desktop client)

#2: swapping generic resources with named resources in resource engagement

Kindly advise.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

MayurPode --

Excellent question. I have been "down this road" multiple times with clients. The method I would recommend would be as follows:

1. Create a custom enterprise Lookup Table named something like Primary Skills, and then list all of the skills you need to track for your resources.
2. Create a custom enterprise Resource field named Primary Skill and attach the Primary Skills lookup table to this field. When you are creating this field, select the "Use this field for matching generic resources" checkbox option. DO NOT select the "Allow multiple values to be selected from lookup table" checkbox for this field as you need to be able to identify a single primary skill for each resource.
3. Create a custom enterprise Lookup Table named something like Skill Levels, and then list the skill levels you want to track for your resources, such as Entry Level, Junior, etc. Be sure to include an NA value in the list of skill levels, by the way.
4. Create a custom enterprise Resource field named Skill Level and attach the Skill Levels lookup table to this field. When you are creating this field, DO NOT select the "Use this field for matching generic resources" checkbox option. Selecting the checkbox will make it way too complicated to use the skill matching feature of the system, so avoid this at all costs.
5. In your Enterprise Resource Pool, create a Generic resource that represents each skill you want to track, and for each Generic resource, select the appropriate Primary Skill value. Set the Skill Level value to NA.
6. For each of the human resources in your Enterprise Resource Pool, specify a value in both the Primary Skill field and the Skill Level field.

After doing all of this, your PMs will be able to use the Match button in the Build Team dialog to match human resources with a selected Generic resource. Your organization will also be able to use this information to analyze resource availability and utilization in Power BI reports. Hope this helps.

[#3]

Hello Dale, Thanks for helping me out, I'll try this approach.