This section applies to anyone who wants a deep understanding of Resource Management, with a specific focus for individuals who are responsible for negotiating and managing the organization’s resources.
Important: If you are not familiar with the Resources areas, we recommend you review the Overview of Resources area. It will provide you with a working knowledge of these areas in Sensei IQ.
Effective resource management as part of the overall project process is a critical path item to the successful completion of competing priorities across your organization.
With accurate resource information you can proactively address resource bottlenecks to minimize delays, reduce schedule related change requests, demonstrate the value of the project management team and resource management role, and build confidence in the project management team’s ability to execute on-time and under budget.
A resource manager in Sensei IQ is mainly responsible for:
As the Resource Manager, you will have the ability to maintain resources records to ensure reporting accuracy.
You also have the flexibility to create calendar exceptions by resource in the event you have resources that will be unavailable for periods of time for any reason.
Calculating the resource capacity is done by creating calendars appropriate for your organization. You can have as many calendars as you need, however, you should try to keep it as simple as possible.
The default calendar should contain all the company-wide exceptions like holidays and other non-working times.
Once you have the calendars configured and assigned to all the named resources, you will see each resource’s capacity in the resource selection dropdown, in heatmaps, and in Insights reporting.
Whether you or the project managers are creating the resource plan for the proposal or the project, it is best practice to select generic resources by role. This allows you to see the demand by role and effectively allocate resources based on availability and perhaps experience applicable to the body of work.
In smaller organizations, where you may only have one project manager or one business analyst, you can request those resources by name.
Using the comment feature, requestors can share additional information with you regarding their resource needs. Perhaps they need a project manager or developer with a specific skillset or someone that is familiar with what is needed based on previous assignments.
Now that resource plans have been created, you will see resource demand on your dashboard and allocate resources by approving requests.
Automated communication provides feedback throughout the process to keep you and resource requestors informed.
Your dashboard provides a variety of ways to view resource demand – proposed, committed, and availability by day, week, or month or any combination as needed.
Disclaimer: Some images in the instructional video and text instructions contained herein may appear different from (or not available) in your organization’s Sensei IQ instance due to specific custom configurations and/or continuous solution updates. Ensure that you are already an enabled user in the Sensei.IQ for Project application and check out the What’s New page. Contact your system administrator for any assistance.