Assigning people to tasks

When configuring your Forecast account, you will need to elect how to manage your resources. Forecast allows you to select between two unique settings, one of which is 'Assign people to tasks'.  For more on how to configure the resource management setting in your account, see Selecting your resource management strategy.

Understanding 'Assign people to tasks', how it is used and the impact it has throughout the platform is crucial to fully maximize the potential and benefits it provides.

This article covers:

• Assigning people to tasks
• Understanding and managing resource utilization

Assigning people to tasks

In Forecast, the setting 'Assign people to tasks' defines how you assign team members' time on projects, how you view and interact with the Schedule People heatmap and how you view, manage and report on resource utilization.

Assign people to tasks is based entirely on task assignments. It does not allow you to create or manage project allocations. 

How to assign people to tasks

Once a project has been created, you need to identify the resources who will be responsible for completing the work. This is done by assigning team members to tasks. Tasks can be created from a project's Scoping page or from the Schedule People heatmap. To learn more about creating and managing tasks, see About tasks and how they work.

Understanding and managing resource utilization

Using Assign people to tasks impacts your resource utilization throughout the entire Forecast platform.  The additional resource management setting selected under Assign people to tasks controls the display of the heatmap and how utilization is defined in Schedule People, Project Timeline and Reporting. 

Understanding resource utilization in Schedule People

Schedule People is a visual representation of time assigned to your team members. The heatmap clearly shows resource time when under, over or fully booked giving you a detailed view when analyzing resource utilization.  The heatmap calculates utilization based on the time assigned over the duration of the task and the working hours assigned to an individual team member. To learn more about your resource management setting, see Selecting your resource management strategy.

Under Assign people to tasks you have the option to choose how tasks will display and impact resource utilization in the Schedule People heatmap. The settings are Heatmap based on Task Estimates and Heatmap based on Time Registrations & Remaining Time Estimates. 

Heatmap based on Task Estimates

Under this setting, Schedule People will display tasks based on their estimate hours assigned to a particular team member. This means any time estimates will display over the duration of the task, and will not consider any time registrations made against a task. 

If a task has more than one assigned team member, the estimated hours will be split evenly over the number of assigned team members. 

For example

• A task has an estimate of 160h and is assigned to two team members.
• The task has a start date of May 1 and an end date of May 31.
  It will display in the heatmap for the duration of the task's time period.
• The task will appear for each team member displaying the entire estimate of the task, or 160h.
• Each team member's utilization will be calculated based on the total estimated task hours and the number of assignees, or 80h (160h / 2 team members). 
• Any time registrations made on the task will not impact the utilization of the team members or reflect in the heatmap.
• When the task is marked 'Done' it will appear as bright green in the heatmap but will remain included in the team member's utilization until the end date of the task has passed. 

Heatmap based on Time Registrations & Remaining Time Estimates

Under this setting, Schedule people will display tasks based on their estimated hours assigned to a particular team member, however it will also consider time registrations made against the task.

For example

• A task has an estimate of 160h and is assigned to two team members.
• The task has a start date of May 1 and an end date of May 31.
  It will display in the heatmap for the duration of the task's time period.
• The task will appear for each team member displaying the entire estimate of the task, or 160h.
• Initially, each team member's utilization will be calculated based on the total estimated task hours and the number of assignees, or 80h (160h / 2 team members)
• Time registrations logged against the task directly impact the task's remaining hours and team member utilization.
  • • One assignee registers 8h. The other assignee registers 2h to the task resulting in a total of 10h registered. 
    • The task's total estimated hours will thus reduce by the total time registered, or 10h.
    • The task will now impact each individual team member's utilization as 70h as the 10h reported time has been deducted from the task's total estimated hours. (80h - 10h = 70h)
• The Schedule does not consider how much time is registered by a specific team member, only total time registrations.
• The remaining time will show the same value for all assigned team members, regardless who reported which number of hours on the task. 
• Tasks marked 'Done' will appear bright green, do not have remaining time values, and will no longer be used in calculating the team members' utilization even if the task end date is in the future. 

Using this setting can be very effective when managing resource utilization based on task assignment so long as team members accurately manage their time registrations and the task's workflow status. 

Understanding resource utilization in Reporting

Resource utilization is a metric that helps you understand resource performance and effort over a specific amount of time. It measures your team's productivity and helps you identify if you are under or overutilizing resources.

In addition to the visual representation of resource utilization in the heatmap, Forecast offers standard reporting such as the Utilization Report to help you drill down into the details of your team, their assigned tasks and billable versus non-billable task time.

Tasks created in Project Scoping, Timeline or Schedule People will appear in the Utilization Report. To learn more about the Utilization report, check out Overview of Utilization Report.