This article explains the navigation and terminology of the OnePlan Resource Planner.
Heading
The Heading bar is where you may access the details of your plan and toggle between different planning modules for your plan.
Icon Menu
You will use these icons and menus to change how your resource plan shows, build your resource plan, and then analyze your resource plan.
Select Columns
Select the Resource column menu to choose sorting or to select additional columns to show in the view. When more columns are added, you may scroll the left side pane left-to-right to see the values or expand the size of the view pane.
Change Pane Sizes
You may adjust the left-right or top-bottom panes as desired.
Terminology & Use of the Resource Planner
1. Cost Types
Here we see Cost Types. Cost types allow organizations to calculate, evaluate and monitor how resources are being allocated. There are possible (and often likely) differences between how our resources’ time is initially planned, booked onto specific work, and then actually spent. The Resource Plan allows multiple cost types so you may analyze the differences. You can toggle from one cost type to another.
The reason these groupings are called “cost” types is because the resource plan hours may be converted to costs when they are imported into the financial plan. The rate for each resource, according to their role or other cost category factor would be multiplied by the number of hours to get the financial value of that resource’s time.
Your organization may have similar or different cost types depending on business use cases and configuration. Here are some example use cases that may apply.
- The Committed Hours cost type would be the initial plan generally estimated at a high level. This is also referred to as top-down planning.
- The Scheduled Hours cost type would be the totals from the detailed task schedule. You could import the task schedule hours into this resource plan cost type.
- The Actual Hours cost type would be the time spent on this plan. You could import the timesheet hours into this resource plan cost type.
2. Totals
The totals show per resource. The calculated total will vary based on the planning mode. The totals are based on which periods are showing in the view.
- Hours: The sum of hours allocated in the visible time periods.
- %: The average percentage of time of a full time person, based on the number of working days in the visible time periods.
- FTE: The average count of a full time person, based on the number of working days in the visible time periods.
3. Time-phased Resource Allocation
Resource usage is viewed and/or edited per time period shown. Based on the Dates menu selection, resource usage may be summed up or broken out in more or less details (i.e. monthly, quarterly, yearly).
4. Resource Pane
The Resource Pane shows in the lower half of your screen. This is where you can see how else the resources are allocated. This is beneficial to first see who is already booked or has availability before or after adding to your plan.
By default, the current plan’s resources will show. Expand any resource to see where else that resource is being utilized.
The colors signify the percentage of the resource’s remaining availability. So, for example, the color will shift from green to yellow to orange to red as the resource becomes overbooked beyond capacity.