Resource-Loaded Scheduling Overview

Cost-Loaded Schedule Overview Video

This topic explains the process of configuring and using resource and role activity assignments in your schedule. Activity assignments enable you to plan your activity units and costs based on the resources and roles assigned to perform the work on each activity. Depending on your organization's preferences, you may be working with resource and role units, costs, or both. Your organization may also choose to not use resource assignments at all and instead update units and costs directly on each activity. If this describes your organization, you should consult the individual help topics found in Modify Activity Details.

Project planning is not a linear process. You may need to change workspace and project settings, add new resources, modify the schedule, and adjust resource and role assignments many times throughout your project's lifecycle. While the recommended sequence of steps is described below, most of these steps can be performed as many times as necessary and in any order. You can plan projects individually or use a program to plan a group of related projects.

Prerequisites

Before you begin statusing your activities using resource and role assignments, you should ensure that the following prerequisites are completed:

Configure workspace and project settings: Use the Get Started with Schedule section (Primavera Cloud only) to configure user privileges, dictionaries, object default settings, and object options. Then, configure project-level settings such as activity defaults and calculations, auto numbering, project calendars, and more. Topics related to resource and role configuration are indicated in their descriptions.
Add resources and roles: Use the Resource List and Role List pages in the Resources app to create workspace-level and project-level resources and roles. Depending on your organization's preferences, you may be using only resources or roles in your projects, or using resource associations to staff role assignments. Both resources and roles can be added at the workspace or project levels depending on whether they will be used across multiple projects in the workspace or just one project. Project resources and roles can be promoted to the workspace level after they are created.
While these sections discuss the configuration of all resource and role details, ensure that the resources and roles you will be assigning to your activities have defined calendars, work availability, and rates. This information is used to calculate when a resource or role can work, how much work they can perform, and how much the work will cost.
Build your schedule: Define the Work Breakdown Structure to arrange your activities into hierarchical levels. Create activities to describe the project work that must be performed. The Modify Activity Details section contains topics for all activity details that can be edited, including resource and role assignments, units, and costs. If you will not be progressing activities using resource or role assignments, you can consult the individual topics contained in that section. If you will be entering activity details at the assignment level, follow the series of topics below, which sequences the same assignment, unit, and cost topics into a recommended order.

Build a Resource-Loaded Schedule

After your schedule takes shape, you can begin to designate resources and roles to work on your activities. Enter units and costs on each assignment to quantify the labor and cost requirements of the activity. At any stage of the project lifecycle, including planning and execution, you can use a variety of tools to monitor your resources and roles for allocation and staffing issues. When these issues are found, you can take the necessary steps to resolve them.

Follow the steps below to build a resource-loaded schedule:

Create activity assignments
- Assign a Role to an Activity: If you will be adding general job requirements to each activity during the early planning stages of your project, assign roles to the activities and later staff them with specific resources. If your project will not use resource assignments, you can just directly assign roles.
- Staff a Role Assignment: Add a resource to an existing role assignment when you know which resource should be assigned to fulfill the role. You can see all of the resources associated with the role to help you make the best choice.
- Assign a Resource to an Activity: Assign resources directly if you already know the resource that will perform the work or if your project will not use role assignments.
Enter activity units and costs
- Configure Assignment Calculation Options: The cost of a resource or role assignment is determined by its units and its rate. Before you enter units and costs on an assignment, you should specify the source of the assignment's rate, the type of rate, and whether the assignment's costs should be calculated in proportion to its units or independent of them.
- Enter Activity Units: Units entered at the activity level are distributed among its resource and role assignments. Units entered on individual assignments roll up to the activity level. If cost values are defined for the project or activity assignments, updating an activity's units may also update its costs.
- Enter Activity Costs: Similar to units, an activity's costs are distributed to its assignments and assignment costs are rolled up to the activity. Depending on your assignment's calculation options, activity costs can be entered directly or calculated from units.
- Assign a Curve to a Resource or a Role Assignment: A curve determines how an assignment's units are spread across the duration of the assignment. By default, units are spread evenly using a linear curve, but other curve patterns include front-loaded, back-loaded, and bell curve. Updating an assignment's units may also update its costs.
- Recalculate Activity Costs: You should frequently recalculate the cost values on the Activities page to ensure they are up-to-date and accurate.
Monitor resource and role usage
- Usage Histograms and Spreadsheets: Monitor unit and cost usage data directly from the Activities page for the resources and roles assigned to activities in to your project. Select individual resources or roles to view their planned, actual, and remaining data as bars and curves in time-phased histograms, or customize columns and rows to view data in a spreadsheet format.
- Assignment List: Review unit and cost allocations in a time-phased spreadsheet for the resources assigned to your project. You can analyze resource data in a variety of ways by customizing the view. View options include grouping assignments by resource to view each resource's total units and costs across the project, grouping assignments by activity to view activity unit and cost totals, or grouping resources by their associated roles to see which roles are still unstaffed. This page is available in the Resources app for workspace-level and project-level resources.
- Analysis: View separate time-phased spreadsheets for the resources and roles available to your workspace, project, or program. For each resource, view max availability units, the number of currently allocated units, and the number of units by which the resource is underallocated or overallocated. For each role, view max availability units, the number of staffed remaining units, and the number of unstaffed remaining units. You can also view the selected resource or role's units displayed in a histogram.

References

The topics below provide additional information about resource units and costs.

Understanding Activity Units and Costs: This topic introduces the various reference topics that relate to unit and cost fields.
- Activity Unit and Cost Fields: Review the unit and cost fields you can use to record progress on your activities and resource and role assignments.
- Entering Activity and Assignment Units and Costs: A variety of settings and the presence of resource assignments control when you can add unit and cost values to the activity and assignment levels.
- Valid Activity Unit and Cost Values: Depending on an activity's resource type and the number of resources or roles assigned to it, you can enter either positive or negative unit and cost values at the activity and assignment levels.
Recalculate Costs Overview: This topic explains which cost values are updated automatically, which prompt you to recalculate, and which must be manually recalculated using the Recalculate Activity Costs service.
Resource Assignment Detail Window Fields: Reference the definitions of fields used when working with activity resource and role assignments.