Three ways to staff your project

Staffing your projects with the right resources is central to meeting deliverables, quality standards, deadlines and budgets. In identifying suitable resources, a range of variables may need to be considered including:

1. Availability
2. Skills, education and certificates
3. Physical location
4. Organizational structure and resource sharing rules
5. Pay grade

Depending on the organization in question the staffing of projects may fall to different personas. ADEACA ONE provides specific tools to facilitate staffing by:

1. Project managers
2. Resource managers
3. Project team members

The project manager is responsible for a finite list of contracts and staffs the projects directly in the ADEACA ONE planning board. The resourcing status Gantt view makes it easy to identify tasks as either staffed, unassigned or in conflict. As tasks in the WBS are selected a list of matching resources is presented along with availability indicators. Attribute requirements may be adjusted on-the-fly to refine the resource list.

In larger organizations the staffing process often falls to dedicated resource managers or department heads. The resource manager is responsible for a pool of resources or projects rather than individual contracts. The ADEACA ONE dispatch board queries across projects based on user-defined filters and provides an overview of unstaffed work for the resource manager to attend to. The dispatch board work list can be subject to date ranges to fit the planning horizon.

In some organizations staffing is decentralized allowing individual resources to request open project positions. This is predominantly the case for senior personnel in professional services organizations. The ADEACA ONE self-staffing view enables resources to query against published unstaffed work and request assignments. The assignment request is routed to the project or resource manager for approval.

Regardless of the staffing method, once a resource is assigned to a project the assigned tasks are listed in the team member workspace as well as the timesheet. Timesheet lines can be initiated directly from assigned tasks which simplifies the time recording process and reduces erroneous data entry. Directly from the timesheet, team members can report task status (started, progress & completed) and report remaining work estimates back to the project manager.

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