Resource View by Project

Andy Skinner

Hi

I wonder if anyone might be able to shed some light on an issue I'm experiencing. I'm a new Smartsheet user so I could well be doing something wrong or expecting Smartsheet to work in a way that it doesn't. I'll set out the issue below and if anyone can explain what I'm doing wrong, or if there is a different way to do this in Smartsheet I'd be grateful. 

I'm trying to build a workload view using sheets and the Resource View, so we can schedule projects more effectively.

I've set up 2 sheets which are used as roadmaps for allocating work to people. One sheet holds project allocations and is also used as a project roadmap, the other sheet holds non-project allocations (line management % allocations, support % allocations etc.) that we don't want to show on the project roadmap.

In order to see people's total allocated workload based on the data held in these two sheets, I then created a Resource View and chose "By Project", carefully selecting only those two sheets that I want to pull in the allocation percentages from.

I was expecting that only the allocation percentages from those two sheets would be visible in the Resource View I've created, however allocation percentages from other sheets are also being pulled into the Resource View for named resources on those two sheets... this means that the overall allocations for each person in the Resource View reflect not just the roadmap allocations that I want, but also include other %age allocations from sheets that they have created!

To put this another way:

> Create Smartsheet called "Project Roadmap" and add a task called "Project X" for Bob that runs 1st July to 30th December, allocate him 50%

> Create Smartsheet called "Non-Project Roadmap" and add a task for Bob called "Line Management" that runs 1st July to 30th December, allocate him 50%

> Independently, Bob now creates his own plan for Project X, called "Bob's Project X Plan", allocating some tasks to himself.

> Create "Resource View" and select the "By Project" option, choosing only the "Project Roadmap" and "Non-Project Roadmap" sheets.

> The resource view shows allocations for Bob from all 3 sheets ("Project Roadmap", "Non-Project Roadmap", "Bob's Project X Plan"), rather than just the 2 sheets selected ("Project Roadmap", "Non-Project Roadmap").

Best regards,

Andy

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Andy,

You're not doing anything wrong, this is expected with the resource management functionality. Although you're narrowing it down to two sheets, resource management is designed to show other projects that a resource is allocated on with overlapping dates to your two sheets in order to give you the full picture on their allocation (or overallocation).

There currently isn't a way to change this behavior, rather this gives you an opportunity to make sure that a resource isn't completely overallocated on items that you're not aware of. You'll want to set their allocation % correctly on all sheets in your resource view so that the resource understands how much energy they should be putting into their tasks.

Andy Skinner

Hi Shaine

Thanks for letting me know. 

Best regards,

Andy

slicknate

I am having the same issue and I understand Shaine's response in terms of the capability, but this begs the question as to what the point of the "By Project" filter on the Resource View? If I used the filter, what would I be searching for? 

mambrose

I agree with slicknate, what is the point of being able to filter by project then?  Seems like a bug to me.  If I want to see all projects I will use the All resource view.

uldis.vilks

I was planning to used this resource view for resource planning for future projects and for this purpose wanted to create several resource view plans - one for open projects another for prospect projects. Currently it is not possible. The only workaround which I found is to disable Dependencies for prospect projects

 

Rex Clark

I would agree with all the comments that seems to be a bug in the system. I work in a corporate office of over 5K employees. Smartsheet is our only project management app. So I am showing resource allocations of 700% in a week which is not possible.

I have resources on my project that are from a project that was shut down but the smartsheet plans go through the year so I am not able to properly setup resource views for my current project.

To make matters worse people have asked for a copy of my plan to "play round with". If they don't remove my project employees, those allocations are reflected on other sheets.

I should be able under project view to list just sheets in my overall project to see the allocation. Until I am able to do this resource allocation is useless.

Rex

Eben Gay

As I understand it the "filter by project" is filtering the list of resources to only those used by the selected projects. It still shows every reference to those resources across all sheets with resource tracking enabled.