Resource management is essential to project success. Forecast recognizes this and provides three distinct company-level settings to help you manage projects and resources effectively. Choose how to allocate resources when setting up your account, and tailor Forecast to match your existing project and resource management style.
This article covers:
- Your Project Management Style
- Your Resource Management Style
- Your Company's Resource Management Setting
Your Project Management style
To successfully manage your resources, team members, and projects, it’s important to first identify your working style. Project management typically falls into two distinct styles, influenced by factors like the industries you work with, the type of team and resources you manage, your clients' needs, and the deliverables defined in your projects and pipeline.
Even if you're already familiar with your project management style, it’s helpful to reflect on a few key questions to ensure you choose and implement the right resource management setting in Forecast. Your answers will guide you toward the best-fit approach.
Consider the following:
- How do you define the scope of your projects?
- Do you plan all tasks upfront, or allocate resources based on estimated effort?
- Do you work in sprints or follow Scrum methodology?
- Are your project deliverables clearly defined or more fluid?
- How do you manage time tracking?
- Do team members need to log time against specific tasks for reporting or invoicing?
- What existing processes do you use to manage your team and projects?
Your Resource Management Style
The way you manage projects directly impacts how you manage resources. Forecast offers three resource management settings:
Based on your answers to the questions above, you’ll be able to determine which setting best fits your needs, your current processes, and your overall project management style.
Allocate people to projects
Allocate people to projects offers maximum flexibility in how you manage your team’s time and capacity. It’s ideal for teams that may not have a fully defined project scope upfront or that don’t require time tracking at the task level.
This setting is commonly used by larger organizations with dedicated resource management teams, and by teams that work in sprints or follow scrum methodologies. However, working in sprints is not a requirement. Even though time is allocated at the project level, you can still create and manage tasks for organization or time tracking purposes—just note that tasks won’t impact resource utilization. In this setting, utilization is based solely on the time allocated to a project.
One key advantage of this approach is the ability to choose allocation types:
- Soft allocations: Tentatively book resources for projects that haven’t been confirmed.
- Hard allocations: Confirm actual, committed time for assigned project work.
This flexibility gives you better visibility into resource availability and upcoming project demands.
Choosing this setting also unlocks Capacity Planning features, including the use of Placeholders, which allow you to plan for roles and resource needs across your project pipeline, even before specific team members are assigned.
Assign people to tasks
Assign people to tasks is ideal for teams that require more detailed time tracking, those with a smaller pool of resources or teams that need to closely monitor task-level progress. That said, larger organizations can absolutely benefit from this setting too. The value comes down to your working style and how closely you need to track time and task completion.
To ensure accurate resource utilization, tasks must be created and assigned to specific team members or roles. This setting includes two additional configuration options that affect how the utilization heatmap displays data, each offering different insights into your team's workload and project progress:
- Heatmap based on Task Estimates: Shows the full estimated time for each task across the project timeline, regardless of how much time has been logged.
- Heatmap based on Time Registrations & Remaining Task Estimates: Reflects the remaining effort, calculated as the original task estimate minus any time already registered on the task.
Both views are valuable—it just depends on how you prefer to visualize your team's workload and project status.
Both project allocations and task assignments
Both project allocations and tasks assignments, known as Combined Mode, offers the flexibility of both project-level allocations and task-based assignments, giving you the best of both resource management approaches.
- Project allocations - ideal for high-level planning and assigning teams to projects for broader timeframes, such as weeks or months.
- Task assignments - better suited for detailed, granular planning where resource managers assign individuals to specific tasks in the near or long-term future.
Relying on only one of these approaches can be limiting, especially for teams or projects that require both big-picture planning and day-to-day task-level detail. Combined Mode bridges that gap, allowing you to plan resources at a high level for the future, while managing specific task assignments in the short term.
This dual-layered approach is particularly useful for organizations that need flexibility across multiple planning horizons and project types. Plus, Combined Mode includes Capacity Planning, Placeholders and Hard/Soft Allocations.
Your Company's Resource Management Setting
Typically, you select your resource management setting when configuring your account. The setting is accessible only to Admins. While it is not advisable to periodically switch between the options in the setting, you do have ability to change your selection if the need arises.
To configure your Resource Management setting
- Click Admin in the navigation bar.
- Select Company Details from the dropdown.
- Scroll to Resource management.
- Select the setting that best fits your working style.
- If you select either Assign people to tasks or Both project allocations and task assignments, be sure to also select your heatmap setting.
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