Resource and Role Usage Overview

The Activities page provides time-phased views of resource and role usage for the activities in your project in the form of histograms and spreadsheets. These can be configured to show resource and role unit and cost data across the timeline of the project.

Resource and role data is displayed in separate tabs in the Project Usage detail window. Each tab supports a tree to select resources or roles and three distinct views to display their data:

• Not Stacked Histogram: Units or costs can be broken down into planned, actual, and a variety of remaining early and remaining late field values. In the settings, enable bars and cumulative curves that aggregate each field's values for the resources or roles selected in the resource or role tree. For units, toggle the display of a max availability line to show the allocation limits for the selected resources or roles. Toggle overallocation bars to see where schedule adjustments or additional assignments may be necessary.

  The Not Stacked Histogram displays cumulative usage values in an S-curve style chart. The planned usage curve plots the progression of planned units or costs over time for the selected resources or roles. The actual curve tracks actuals up to the latest date they exist, typically the data date. The remaining early and remaining late curves begin where the actual curve ends, indicating the remaining work to be performed. It is possible for the remaining curves to be plotted on the same points in time, in which case the remaining early curve will be shown on top. In a program, projects with different data dates may show the actual curve from one project plotted on the same points as a remaining curve of a different project. The two curves are shown as dashed lines to indicate overlapping values. It is recommended that all projects in a program are scheduled with the same data date. See also Display Cumulative Usage in an S-curve.

  Note: The cumulative curve display will begin one day prior to the planned start day to ensure that the planned curve starts at a zero point.

• Stacked Histogram: At completion values are shown as stacked bars, with each bar representing a different resource or role scheduled during that time period. You can also stack the bars by a specific resource/role code.

  Additional options, such as chart legends, sight lines, and bar values are available in the settings for both histograms. The histograms display the spreads of resources and roles according to the calendar used by each of their activity assignments. This depends on an activity's duration type, which controls whether to use the activity's calendar or the calendars of each of its assignments. Resource and role underallocation and overallocation indications are determined by their individual resource calendars.

• Spreadsheet: Unit and cost data in the spreadsheet is aggregated to spreadsheet row totals and distributed across a timescale. Each selected resource or role shows time-phased units and costs optionally grouped by a summary band containing unit and cost totals. In the settings, you can select incremental and cumulative fields to display as rows in the spreadsheet. You can also configure grouping bands to more easily view each resource or role grouping.

The histograms and spreadsheets display the usage of activity assignments in your current schedule. Usage data in an open baseline or schedule scenario is not reflected. At the program level, view resource and role usage for activities in each of the projects within the program.

Understanding Role Availability

You can enter units in time-phased intervals on the timescale as job-hours or as full-time equivalent (FTE) values. FTE represents the number of full-time employees needed to complete the work in a specified time period. Planning units using FTE values makes it easy to compare work requirements across time intervals with different durations (such as months) and manage multiple roles that may all have different calendar availabilities. Depending on your user preferences, FTE can be entered as units/duration (whole numbers and decimals) or as percentages. Use the following guidelines to fill in the FTE value:

• If only one full time employee is needed to complete the work for the time period specified, enter a value of 1.0 (or 100%) for the FTE.
• If more than one full time employee is needed to complete the work, enter a value that equals the number of employees needed. For example, if four full time employees are needed to complete the work, enter a value of 4.0 (or 400%) for the FTE.
• If the work can be done by part time employees or full time employees working less than the number of hours expected for the time period, you can enter the FTE in decimals to indicate the percentage of the time period that needs to be worked. For example, if you only need a part time employee working half of the hours expected for the time period, you can enter an FTE of 0.5 (or 50%). Or, for example, if the role needs to be done by a full time employee working full time and an additional part time employee working half of the hours, then you can enter an FTE of 1.5 (or 150%).

On the Resource or Role Usage Charts, you can toggle on FTE to view the resource or role units in FTE (your organization might refer to this as "man-days"). FTE values are displayed in the timescale set for the Gantt chart for the page. The working days and hours represented in the FTE values are determined by the calendar associated to the resources or role assignments.

Here is an example to understand how to interpret the FTE values on the Resource or Role Usage histograms. In this example, you have 1 full-time resource assigned to 1 activity; the activity duration is a year. The calendar assigned to the resource sets a 5 day work week, with 8 hours per work day. When the timescale is set to Week/Day, the FTE is 1 because there is 1 work day with a full-time employee working. When the timescale is set to Month/Week, the FTE value for the week is 5 to represent the 5 working days of the resource. When the timescale is set to Quarter/Month, the FTE will be equal to the number of working days in the month (for example, 22); and so on for the rest of the timescale options. If you have two full-time resources for the activity, then the values will be doubled, to represent two full-time workers on a work day.