Resource Management - Assignments and regional holidays - what am i missing?

Matt Stewart

I'm feeling very confused or very swindled. Either way not thrilled right now.

I was sold on the promise that Resource Management will be SS's integrated (via add-on) resource planner, where you can apply different roles, placeholders, regional holidays, etc; and that this would all lead to improved task assignments and schedule planning.

Instead, what i am seeing is:

• Regional holidays are manually applied "leave types" that must be crafted for each individual resource, not applicable to region or department, nor date based.
• Leave's are not applied to tasks in any way meaningful on scheduling assignments during project creation via Control Center and/or Smart Sheet. Holidays and leaves are completely ignored from SS/CC's scheduling.
• There is zero indication in SS on assignment/scheduling risks when assigning resources who may or may not be available. Even after "updating" the resource management side panel, there is still zero notice/indication that the task you assigned will not be completed on time due to assignee being on leave.
• We will need to frequently log in to Resource Management, go to EACH AND EVERY assigned leave across EVERY resource, make several clicks to access "remove overlapping assignments" option, only to have any overlapping assignments reduce in duration. It does NOT adjust the completion date based on downtime, but just shorten lead times? This means assignments become unrealistic in duration, making schedules a near guarantee for failure?

Am i missing something? Other than the pretty (and useful) allocation heatmap, there is literally zero positive functionality to aid in resource planning or project scheduling? Instead its actually making scheduling worse and makes heatmap unreliable.

Hoping its a huge misunderstanding on my part and im just not understanding how to leverage this?

Matt Stewart

ADDING:

I even tried updating user profiles in Resource Management to make "part time availability" schedules indicating days they can work, and omitting holidays. This makes zero indication of unavailability in SS, but even RM scheduling and heatmap views show no "unavailability" or scheduling downtimes ... begging the question... WTF?

Genevieve P.

Hi @Matt Stewart

Thank you for voicing your concerns and detailing your use-case. I have passed this thread along to the Product team so they can hear the valuable feedback you have on your experience with this scenario. We are exploring ways to make these workflows better and this is helpful.

You can submit any other Product suggestions and feedback points to the Product team through this form, here.

Thank you,

Genevieve

MauroM

Is there any update on this topic?

I am experiencing exactly the same problem and I am surprised this has not been addressed yet

rshiers

Vote for my idea - Regional Public Holidays — Smartsheet Community