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Can I create a generic resource?

I want to create a generic resource as a placeholder in V6.

Sking Answered

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You can do this the same as V5.4.  All you need to do is create a new user for that placeholder and simply don't assign a license to that user. When inviting the user I would click "invite multiple people" so you can already put in a name and select "None" as user type. 

Josh Santos 0 votes
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Hi Josh,

We had previously set-up a number of 'generic' users for various Job Titles we have in the company in a similar manner to your comments above.  This allows the allocation of generic resources to planned work items prior to the allocation of specific individuals to those tasks. 

This has however caused us an issue with the Group Planned Work & Load View as the 'generic' resource is included in the % utilisation calculation.  As an example, please see attached Planned Work & Load.jpg.  This is a fairly simple example of Planned Work and Load grouped by Job Title (in this case Project Planner/Scheduler).  There are two (2) resources - myself and a 'Generic Project Scheduler'.   As you can see I am loaded at 95%, while the generic resource has 0% load.  The overall calculated %utilisation for the group is 47% (being the average of myself and the generic resource).  Is there a way to set-up the generic resource so that it isn't included in the %utilisation?

I have tried the approach of not assigning a Job Titles to the generic resources, however this affects output of the 'Resource Availability' report we are using to get a view of planned work (by days per month). 

Essentially we want to be able to include & report on the planned work assigned to a 'generic' resource, but not include the 'generic' resource as part of the count of resources available to do the work.  At the moment we are doing some offline calculations in Excel to achieve this but would welcome your input on alternative approaches available in Clarizen to achieve this. Note, we have already  migrated to v6 .

Thanks

Arnie Ganson

 

 

Arnold Ganson 0 votes
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I typically create a separate group just for placeholders. Can you provide more details on why not giving them a job title would break the report?

Josh Santos 0 votes
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Hi Josh,

I have previously already created a separate group for our generic resource types.

Not including the Job Title doesn't actually break the report - it just ends up not providing the data we require. I probably didn't explain what we are trying to do achieve that well.

(1) If we include a Job Title for the generic resources:

At a detailed level the Group (by Job Title) Planned Work & Load view provides the format & content that we need when looking at our overall organisation forecast resource needs. It provides a listing of people (including our generic resource) grouped by Job Title & includes a detailed planned work load breakdown by person, by project, by task.  This is very useful for more detailed analysis of our forecast resource needs.  See attached image "1. Resource Load by Group (Job Title)" for an example of forecast Business Analsyt Resource Load. From this we can ascertain which Business Analysts are overloaded or underloaded, and which projects have a need for a Business Analyst but no specific person assigned.

For reporting to our Executive Management group we however do not need or want to include this level of detail. Reporting to this level needs to focus on a higher level sumary view (see attached image "2. Resource Load Summary Level".  The information contained at this level is misleading - it is suggesting that through to May-14 our Business Analyst workload is on or around 90-100%.  This is incorrect as the calculation includes the 'Generic Business Analyst' as an available resource.  We want to include the work allocated to the generic resource, but we don't want to include the generic resource as an available resource.

A similar situtaion exists when we run the 'Resource Availability' report, however I have found a (time consuming) way to format/customise the Excel export of this report to better suit our needs. 

  (2) If we don't include a Job Title for the generic resources:

See attached "3. Planned Work & Load View - No Generic Resource".  At a detailed level while this provides a view of the planed workload for our existing people it doesn't provide visibility of planned work not yet allocated (i.e.  the Genereic Business Analyst). From an Executive Management perspective it would appear that through to May-14 our Business Analyst workload is only 60-90%.  This is incorrect/misleading as the calculation doesn't include planned work allocated to the generic Business Analyst.

A similar situtaion exists when we run the 'Resource Availability' report.  In this case, I am not even able to format/customise the Excel export of this report to better suit our needs. 

Hopefully the above (& the attached) help explain things better? At this stage it seems there isn't a way to get the output we are looking for, apart from contuining with the formatting/customising of the 'Resource Availability' report that I currently doing.

Please let me know if you have any other suggestions/ideas that we can investigate.

Thanks

Arnie

Arnold Ganson 0 votes
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What about creating a job title for "Planned Business Analyst Work" and other job titles.  So you would have 2 job titles for each job.  This should fulfill scenario 1 and for scenario 2 you will just need to add both job titles into the view for the full picture. This is the only idea I can think of at the moment with the current capabilities.

Josh Santos 0 votes
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As I was putting together my last entry that thought was starting to cross my mind.  I'll give it a try & let you know how it works.

Thanks.

Arnold Ganson 0 votes
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Hi Josh,

Have experimented with the suggestion of creating 2 job titles for each job (for just 1 job).  This works as expected and has some merits but doesn't quite achieve what we are after in terms of reporting to Senior Management so still needed some customising of an Excel export.

Another thought I had was whether there is a means to customise a copy of the 'Resource Availability' report?  This is a Clarizen system report & by default doesn't provide a way to modify the report (which I understand).  Can a copy of the report be created so that we can customise to better suit our needs?  We would still need to do some further customising/formatting after exporting to Excel but this would assist in reducing the time required to do this.

Arnold Ganson 0 votes
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It is currently not possible to copy that report, but that is a planned future upgrade (no ETA yet).

Josh Santos 0 votes
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Hi Josh,

I'm a new Clarizen user starting off on v6. When I try to add placeholder resources as described at the top of this thread, I keep getting this error: 

0 user(s) were added.

4 user(s) were not saved due to errors / missing fields.

0 user(s) were not saved due to validation errors.

I was trying to do this through the People/Common/Invite User/Advanced pop-up. Since they are placeholder resources, they do not have an email addresses. I do not have "external user" box checked, yet when I go back to see what resources triggered the error, the external box is checked. Can you please walk me through step by step how to do this? I must be missing something. You help would be appreciated.

 

Thank you.

Katie 

Katie Larson 0 votes
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Hi Katie.  You do need to add an email address here even though it will not be utilized.  I would use a fake email address such as "test@test.com," make sure the user type is marked as "None."  It does not matter if external user is checked or unchecked. Let me know if that works for you.  Thanks!

Josh Santos 0 votes
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