How to Manage Ideas › Staff a Team to Work on an Idea

Staff a Team to Work on an Idea

To start capacity and portfolio planning, staff your most promising ideas with resources. Ideas are not associated with tasks and staffing them does not result in long-term commitments for that staff. For example, you can staff an idea with team members to perform up-front work before approving the idea. Add additional staff to estimate and plan capacity before converting the idea into a project, investment, or service.

You can allocate roles or resources, and labor or non-labor types. The staff can record the time that they spent working on an idea on their timesheet.

Use a role as a placeholder when you do not know the name of the resource you want to staff on your idea. When a specific resource is not available, you can staff your idea with multiple instances of a role. For example, assign programmer (1) and programmer (2) to represent two different requirements with a programming role.

Note: You cannot staff multiple instances of the same named resource to an idea.

Follow these steps:

1. Open the idea.
2. Click Team.
3. To select individual resources or roles for the idea staff, click Add.

   The Select Resources page appears.

4. To add all the resources in a selected OBS unit to the idea staff, click Add/Update by OBS.
5. Select the resources and roles to add to the idea staff.

   Use the Search Filter to find resources or roles by name or other criteria.

6. Click Add to add the resources and roles. All resources are automatically allocated at 100 percent of their available working days.
7. Adjust any of the following values:

   Role

   Displays the role of the resource, which can be different from the primary role selected in the resource profile.

   Time

   Displays a yellow checkmark if the resource or role is allowed to enter time for the idea.

   Booking Status

   Displays the resource or role booking status:

   • Hard. The resource is committed to the idea.
   • Soft. The resource is tentatively scheduled for the idea.
   • Mixed. Both soft and hard allocation exists for the resource.

   Start

   Displays the team member allocation start date. If not defined, the date defaults to the start date of the idea.

   Finish

   Displays the team member allocation finish date. If not defined, the date defaults to the finish date of the idea.

   % Allocation

   Displays the team member percent allocation to the idea. Each staff member is assigned to the idea at 100 percent of the resource available time by default.

   Allocation

   Displays the number of hours the resource has been tentatively booked to the idea. Unless you change the booking dates, staff members are automatically booked for the entire duration of the idea. This field cannot be edited. Its value changes to reflect edits that you make using the following options:

   • The setting allocation options.
   • The new allocation curves defined on the Idea Staff Member: Properties page.
   • The Shift Allocation option.

   Allocated Actuals

   Displays the total number of hours the resource has recorded to date on this idea.

   Incident Actuals

   Displays the time posted to incidents associated with this idea.

   Total Actuals

   Displays the aggregated total actual time posted. This value is the sum of the allocated actuals and the incident actuals.

8. To open the resource profile and change planned and hard allocations, click the Properties icon.
9. To open the Find Resources page for the selected resource and to replace the resource or role with a different resource or role, click the Resource Finder icon.
10. To edit the properties for a resource, click a resource name in the list.
11. To update the resource or role allocation, click an entry in the Resource Allocation column.

    Note: When adding resources to your idea staff, you could easily over-allocate the resource by mistake. In this case, a confirmation page appears. The available hours for a resource can be less than the total number of requested hours. In this case, instead of the Booking Confirmation page, the Remaining Availability Confirmation page appears.

12. Confirm that you want to over-allocate the resource, or accept the remaining availability of the resource. When the confirmation page appears, select one of the following options:

    Overallocate

    Over-allocates the resource.

    Remaining Only

    Books the resource for the amount listed in the Remaining Availability column.

13. Adding a resource to the project or investment displays overbooking in the Remaining Availability Confirmation page. If the resource is booked at 100 percent (default) of their availability, the 100 percent Resource Allocation column lists the number of utilized hours. The Remaining Availability column indicates the actual number of available work hours for the resource on your project.
14. (Optional) View the bottom-up aggregated work effort by role or switch the view to edit the planned work for the idea.

    Note: Staff allocation is the period during which a resource is booked to an idea. Unless you change the booking dates, staff members are automatically booked for the entire duration of the idea. The allocation amount granted for a resource can be calculated as follows:

    Total number of working days * Number of available hours per day
    

    The total working days includes start and finish dates. ETC is based on the number of hours a resource is assigned to the idea.

15. Save the changes.