Resource Management for part-time resources

Sarah A

Hi everyone,

 

I'm trying to work out how to do resource management for part-timers. There are two parts to my conundrum:

 

1. I'd like to be able to set up resources as (for example) 80% FTE (so they only work 4 days/week).

 

2. I'd like Smartsheet to understand that 100% allocation for such a resource = 4 days, not 5, or 50% allocation = 2 days, not 2.5. So if I had a part-timer allocated for 5 days/week, they would be flagged as over-allocated.

 

I haven't had any luck finding a solution, and as far as I can tell the only way to do this would be to set each resource up in the vacation sheet with their weekly days off as vacation days. This seems unnecessarily complex so I'm wondering if I've missed a simpler solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

J. Craig Williams

Sarah,

 

I struggled with this as well.

Are your part timers on a fixed schedule or do they work 32 hours sometime during the 5 day week?

 

I had an engineer that worked 20 hours but was flexible. I had to teach my manager that 50% utilization was the engineer fully booked. 

 

For my team, we would have several hours of training and meetings during the week but these were fixed. For sake of example, let's say 4 hours / week.

I wanted to account for this in schedules and not spread over every day.

So I set up 5 worksheets for daily activities. In Project Settings, I set each to have 1 work day per week. And then I populated the each hour as 12.5% of the day.

We also had a vacation and out-of-office sheet.

 

If I worked with a PM that thought 100% utilization was good, then my engineers would show up as overbooked on the meeting and training days.

 

The resource view then pointed out potential conflict (you schedule my guy for work when he is on vacation) or other duties (training).

I am very good at seeing patterns, so it was easy to see the places to pay attention to.

 

I hope that wasn't too long a digression.

If your part-timers are fixed (Mon-Thurs), set up a sheet for their tasks with only those days as working days.

 

It takes a while to work out the kinks when there are multiple schedules and task lists, but the effort is worth it, in my opinion.

 

Craig