How to account for planned employee hires?

Hello all,

In our Smartsheet RM instance we have a planned ERP replacement project which has a huge resource demand starting in a few months, but we plan to hire additional staff between now and then in order to balance supply and demand. However, we cannot represent the new hires in RM right now because they have not been hired yet, so they don't show up in our Smartsheet account.

Has anyone come across this issue before? Any suggestions on how to address it, short of exporting everything to Excel and working from there (not my preference)?

Thanks!

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

Georgie

Hi @Scott Wadland,

Placeholders are generally used in a project when you don’t yet know who will be performing the work. Placeholders can have a role, discipline, and a custom bill rate, but they don’t have availability and therefore don’t have a utilisation rate. Take a look here for more information: Use placeholders in projects.

You may also want to check out this article for more information on Capacity view, particularly the “Understand capacity view” section, as this includes information about placeholders.

In order for you to see the availability of future hires, you could create managed resources for future hires, as managed resources will reflect in Capacity View.

Hope that helps!

Georgie

All comments

AngB789

Hello @Scott Wadland You could use placeholders in RM.

-They do appear in capacity and utilization reporting
You can fully model the workload even though the team member doesn’t exist yet.

—They can hold roles, disciplines and rates — realistic forecasting
Let’s say you know you’re hiring 3 Business Analysts in June.
You can create:

BA Placeholder 1
BA Placeholder 2
BA Placeholder 3

Assign them to the ERP project with the expected allocation.
RM will show you the resourcing impact right now.

-When the new hire is onboarded, swap them in
Simply “reassign” all placeholder allocations to the real person — no rebuilding needed.

Scott Wadland

Hi Angela,

Thanks for your comment, however it appears that setting up placeholders does not solve the problem for us.

TL;DR - it seems that using placeholders allows you to model demand that has not yet been assigned to a resource, but it does not allow you to model future hires with capacity to take on work. The only resources that can be set up with capacity are "People" in our Smartsheet instance, which in our case is limited to actual employees.

I've provided some more context and screen shots below:

We have placeholders set up for all of the disciplines within our department (HR), and we have the upcoming ERP work assigned to the placeholders. In the case of our Compensation team, they have a total demand of 13.9 FTE but only 10 FTEs on staff, so we have an excess demand of 3.7 FTE (not sure why the numbers don't add up exactly, but that's not today's problem). I can see this in the Schedule > Capacity view:

Drilling down into the Schedule > People > Allocation Heatmap, I can see that the ERP work is assigned to the HR Compensation placeholder - in fact we need two resources from that team.

If I create additional placeholders to represent our future hires, I can assign work to them, however it does not increase our capacity, so the Schedule > Capacity view still shows the same numbers.

Thanks,

Scott Wadland

Program Director, HR PMO

Boston Children's Hospital

Georgie

Hi @Scott Wadland,

You may also want to check out this article for more information on Capacity view, particularly the “Understand capacity view” section, as this includes information about placeholders.

In order for you to see the availability of future hires, you could create managed resources for future hires, as managed resources will reflect in Capacity View.

Hope that helps!

Georgie

Scott Wadland

Thanks @Georgie - I thought I had tried adding managed resources before but didn't see their availability reflected, but I just tried it again and it worked.

Scott

Sign in to join the conversation!

Quick Links

Component react.discussion.discussions had an error.

ref must be one of: categoryID, siteSectionID, category, category/categoryID, category/name, category/description, category/url, category/allowedDiscussionTypes, locale, siteSection, siteSection/basePath, siteSection/contentLocale, siteSection/sectionGroup, siteSection/sectionID, siteSection/name, siteSection/description, siteSection/apps, siteSection/attributes, layoutViewType, discussionID, commentID, page, latest, sort, sortType, lookupSort, discussion, discussion/name, tags, breadcrumbs, discussionApiParams, serverDraftID, serverDraft.