Summary
While planning future projects, an understanding of the availability of each team member is vital. Without visibility into the projects and the corresponding time requirement assigned to each team member, it's easy to mis-allocate resources. This base aims to avoid that by answering a few questions:
- Who has some availability in the planned period?
- If an individual is available in the planned period, how much of their time is available?
- When is a person completely available?
By reviewing project assignments and restrictions on an individuals time, you can:
- Reduce wasted time of underutilized personnel
- Redistribute work from over-allocated teammates
- Limit delays caused by a mis-alignment of project needs and the availability of team members
Be sure to jump over to the Resource Planning dashboard in this base to review the dynamic dashboard!
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Structure of the Base
Each table is required to enable a user to review the availability of all personnel in a specified period.
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Projects
Each record in the Projects table contains high-level, project related information, and is linked only to the Allocation table. A Project may be linked to many records in the Allocation table.
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Allocation
Each record in the Allocation table contains the details of each individuals (Personnel) assignment to a Project. Each Allocation denotes a single individuals assignment to a single project, and includes details such as the percentage of time he/she is expected to spend on the associated Project.
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Personnel
Each record in Personnel table contains the details of that individuals project assignments (Allocations), and is linked to a single record in the Planning table that contains the period in which the user would like to review an individuals availability.
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Data Flow
- Each record in the Personnel table uses the link to a record in the Planning table to lookup the start and end date of the planned period.
- Each record in the Allocation table uses the link to a record in the Personnel table to lookup the start and end date of the planned period. Each Allocation record also uses the link to a record in the Projects table to lookup the assigned project's start and end date.
- The 'Planning Period Allocation' field uses a formula to compare the start and end dates of the project to the start and end dates of the planned period. If there is any overlap, the percent of time allocated to that particular project is returned.
- Each record in the Personnel table rolls up the percentage of the individual's time currently allocated in the associated planning period by summing the values contained in the 'Planning Period Allocation' field in the Allocation table.
- Based on the percentage calculated in the 'Total Allocation in Planned Period' field, additional formula fields can be used used to highlight each person's availability, or lack thereof.
- Based on the information available in these formula fields, we can create views to help identify available personnel.
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Other Uses
Some other uses of this base structure might include:
- Equipment availability management
- Inventory search by barcode