Imagine that you use your QuickBase application to manage projects and their related tasks. You've assigned fourteen tasks to Penny and they're all due on Friday. She'd never say it, but she can't possibly finish on time. Meanwhile, Fred's yapping to his buddies on the phone without a thing to do. If only there were a way to measure how much work you've put on each person's shoulders.
There is! It's QuickBase's Resource Allocation tool. This nifty feature can show you if you've over or under-committed a staff member, and let you make changes in a snap. The Resource Allocation report shows you what percentage of your resources' time is filled. At a glance you can see that Fred has assignments that fill only 20% of his week, while Penny's assignments add up to 250% of her 40 hour work week. If she can find another 60 hours, no problem. If not, you may want to transfer some of her tasks to Fred and others.
Read on to learn how to create and configure a Resource Allocation Report and to understand what it's telling you.
To access and configure the resource allocation report:
If you've converted your Microsoft Project plan into a QuickBase application using QuickBase's Synchronization tool, or created an application from QuickBase's Basic Project Manager or Project Manager Plus templates, your application Dashboard features a number of links. Click the Report on Resource Allocation link. QuickBase opens the Resource Allocation page. To understand what you're looking at, skip ahead to the Reading the Resource Allocation Report section. To learn how to create and design your own custom report, read on.
If your application didn't start life as a Microsoft Project application or one of the templates mentioned above, you can still use this feature—as long as the table you want it to focus on includes the following fields:
Resource Name -
You need to have a field that includes a name of a resource. This
is usually a user type field called Resource Name
or Assigned To.
Note: The resource allocation
tool works only with regular user fields; it does not support the
use of list-user fields.
Start - This must be a date field.
Finish - This also must be a date field.
If the table in question meets all these requirements, you can use the resource tool. But, you'll need to do some setup:
Sign into QuickBase,
Access the setup screen.
Click here or paste the following URL in your browser's address bar: https://www.quickbase.com/db/9kaw8phg?a=dbpage&pagename=Resourceloading.html
QuickBase displays the Resource Allocation configuration screen.
Select the table which contains the task or assignment records you're tracking.
From the Please choose a table dropdown, select the table containing task, assignment or issue records that represent the work your resources tackle. After you do so, QuickBase displays additional fields.
Tip: If your application contains an Assignments table that link Resources to Tasks, select the Assignments table.
Choose a resource field.
Within the Please choose a field that identifies the resource dropdown, select the User field that specifies who's tasked with an item. Depending on your application, this field is probably named something like Assigned To or Resource Name.
Choose a start date field.
To measure allocation, QuickBase needs to know which field you use to measure the duration of a job. Within the Please choose a Start Date field dropdown, select the name of the field which you use to specify the date a task begins.
Choose a finish date field.
Round out the picture by telling QuickBase which field users enter a Finish or completion date. Select the field from the Please choose a Finish Date field dropdown.
Tell QuickBase how you measure staff contributions.
In order to measure resource allocation, QuickBase needs to know how you assign work to each person.
Within the In my projects resources are assigned to tasks section, select one of these three options:
always at 100%. Choose this radio button if your resources work full-time on the tasks you assign to them. With this setting, QuickBase counts each day in a task's duration as a 100% commitment. To get a better idea of how this works, consult the examples that follow discussion of your options.
by some % of the resource's time. Select this option if any of your resources only complete a portion of a particular task. QuickBase will ask you to choose the field you use to measure percent effort. So, if you haven't already, you'll need to create a numeric percentage type field in your Tasks or Assignments table. The idea is, when you assign a task, you can indicate what percentage will be completed by the person you've assigned it to. Then the Allocation report adds this to its calculations. Read on to get some examples of how those calculations work.
by a specific amount of work (like days or hours). If you track staff effort in increments of time, like days or hours, select this option. When you do, QuickBase asks you to choose the field you use to measure effort in time. so, if you haven't already, you'll need to create a numeric type field in your Tasks or Assignments table. When you create or assign a task, you'll use this field to type the number of hours or days an assigned staffer will work on that particular item. To get your Resource Allocation report to take this number into consideration, click the Please choose a time loading field dropdown and select this numeric field. Finally, beneath that dropdown, tell QuickBase if that field measures time in days or in hours by clicking the appropriate radio button. If you choose Hours, QuickBase lets you specify how many hours you and your colleagues work each day. Why? The program needs to know how long your workdays are.
QuickBase
assumes that all your resources are full-time workers that have the entire
week to devote to their assignments. There's no way to change this. Depending
upon your choice in Step 7, QuickBase tallies the contributions of each
staffer based on effort exerted on each of their assignments over the
course of each week. The report then determines what percentage of the
complete work week that total effort represents.
100% examples:
Gladys is assigned to a task that last five days within a given week. That
would put her at 100% allocation for the week. Why? Because with the 100%
setting, QuickBase assumes that Gladys is working all day on the task
she's assigned for as long as that task lasts. Say that a colleague unknowingly
assigns her to another task that lasts five days that same week. That
would result in Gladys being over allocated at 200%.
Within a single week, you assign Bob a task that is two days long and another
that lasts one day. His total allocation for the week would be 60%. Why?
He is allocated at 100% for three days and at 0% for two. Average it out
to get 60%.
By percentage examples:
Imagine that you track assignments by percent effort and Cecily has been
assigned to work 50% on your 5 day task (all within one week) and 100%
on a project that's been ongoing but ends three days into the week that
your task is scheduled. Her total allocation for the week in which the
tasks overlap would be 110%. Why? 50% on 5 days of a week makes 50% effort
for the week. The Resource Allocation Report adds to that three days of
100% effort (60% for the entire week, since two days are free from that
project). 50 plus 60 = 110. So, you can see that Cecily is slightly over
allocated that week.
By amount of work (time) examples:
Say you assign work by hours and your office workday is 8 hours long. Jude
is assigned to work 4 hours on a given task. He has no other assignments
for the week. The Resource Allocation report would show him at 10% allocated
for that week. Why? Because 4 hours is 10% of a 40 hour work week.
Click Display Resource Allocation.
Save the report.
You've created a unique report whose details are stored in the URL you see in your browser's address bar. If this is a report you want to return to again and again, you'll need to create a shortcut to this URL. To do so, you can bookmark the page in your browser. If you want to share this report with your users, go one better and create a hyperlink to the report on your application's Dashboard page. Add a new hyperlink that opens the report you created or replace the destination of Report on Resource Allocation link that comes with many pre-built project management applications. Read how to customize the Dashboard.
QuickBase displays the Resource Allocation table. If you decide you want to change any settings you just made, click your browser's back button to return to the configuration screen.
When you've set all your preferences and clicked Display, the report you designed appears. Each row is a resource and each column represents a week indicated by the date of the Sunday that kicks off each week. The percentages you see represent each person's allotted work for the week. But what does that percentage number really mean? QuickBase calculates that number based on the choices you made when you created the allocation report. Each figure represents the percentage of a week's work that a given resource is scheduled to be working on specific jobs.
Confused about where this report gets its numbers? Return to the previous section and read the highlighted section entitled How the Resource Allocation Report tabulates its percentages.
What assignments make up each number
in this report?
Click a number to see the list of tasks or assignments that comprise the
allocation percentage. To return to your application's dashboard
page, click the Return to Dashboard button at the bottom
of the page.
When the Resource Allocation Report first displays, it includes information for ALL task or assignment records. If you want to see a specific subset (like only tasks belonging to a certain project or those scheduled to start after a particular date) you can specify that by selecting a report from the dropdown beneath the table. (If you don't have an existing report that specifies the criteria you want, create a new report for the table, and launch the resource allocation report again.) After you select a report, click the Refresh button to update the table display.
Reallocating resources
The numbers in the report shown above are out of whack. How can you reallocate these resources? To do so, click on any value and QuickBase shows a list of the underlying task or assignment records. Even out the workload by editing them. Assign several to a different person, for instance. This report is just that: a report. It doesn't perform load balancing. You must do that manually.