HelpProject & Resource Managers

How allocation works

Resource management is only available with the RepliconPSM, RepliconPPM, Professional Services Automation, and Project Portfolio Management products

If resources are shared between projects, you may want to manage them through allocation. Allocation allows you to plan the time resources spend on projects, which can help you:

  • Improve efficiency

​You can review the planned hours for each resource to ensure their time is fully utilized.

  • Forecast billing revenue and costs

​Replicon automatically creates estimates based on resource allocations. Using these estimates, you can track future revenue and costs.

  • Identify gaps

​If you plan projects early on, you can see areas where you don’t have enough resources and make plans to fill the gaps.

  • Save employees time

​You can choose to pre-fill employee timesheets with their alloated hours.

Setting allocations

When you allocate a resource to a project, you specify:

  • How much time the resource will spend on the project
  • When that work will happen

Then, when a new project is created, you can see which resources still have time available and allocate them to reserve their time for the new project.

For example, Project A requires 25 hours of work. You allocate John to work on Project A for 5 hours per day from May 21st to May 25th. Later on, Project B is added and it requires 10 hours of work for the same period. You can see that John still has 3 hours available each day, so you allocate 2 hours per day to Project B.

 

May 21st

May 22nd

May 23rd

May 24th

May 25th

Total

John's total hours

8 hours

8 hours

8 hours

8 hours

8 hours

40 hours

Project A allocation

5 hours

5 hours

5 hours

5 hours

5 hours

25 hours

Project B allocation

2 hours

2 hours

2 hours

2 hours

2 hours

10 hours

Using placeholders

Instead of allocating a specific resource, you can allocate a placeholder to represent a future resourcing requirement. When you are ready to allocate a real resource, you can swap out the placeholder with the resource.

Placeholders can be helpful:

  • When planning a tentative project

​If the project has not been approved, you may not want to reserve actual resources. Instead, you can allocate placeholders, which allows you to develop estimates while keeping resources free for approved projects.

  • For evaluating demand versus capacity

​You can use placeholders to plan out your long-term resource demand. By comparing the placeholder workload against your current capacity, you can determine what hiring and skill development is needed to meet the future demand.

  • To communicate resource requests

​If resources are assigned by a centralized group, Project Managers can allocate a placeholder to indicate the type of resource they need and when. You can then review the placeholder’s allocation, identify a resource to meet the requirement, and replace the placeholder.