Project Manager - Plan Work - Add

Privilege Needed: Project Manager

Location: Project Manager - Plan Work - Add.

The following screens are used to facilitate the addition of the new plan work items for users having a Unanet UnaSource user role:

Add planned work - Find records

Add planned work - List records

Create planned work

Assign planned work

Creating planned work items gives the Project Manager the flexibility to explore various "what if" scenarios without impacting people's work. Once the Project Manager is satisfied with the work plan they created, they can transfer the plan into the actual assignment. At that point, the users will be able to see the work that was planned for them and can start reporting time and expenses against the actual project and/or task.

A Project Manager's ability to plan work will be limited to the following projects:

all Open projects

all projects for which they are a Project Manager

all projects for which they are an Alternate Project Manager

Find Records

The following screen will allow the Project Manager to identify the people for whom they wish to create planned work.

A Project Manager is required to select a project for which the planned work items will be created.

The value chosen from the project list will be used to create the planned work, however the rest of the selection criteria available on the page will determine the list of people available for planning.

A Project Manager is required to specify a value for the Date Range and Planning For radio group. Either Hours or Percent may be specified.

The list of people will include all people that:

Belong to the specified Person Organization or who’s names were explicitly selected and
Have the specified amount of available time within the specified Date Range and
Have the skills of the specified Type or have explicitly selected Skill(s) (Level)

Additionally, a Project Manager may choose to include people that did not have enough free time in the Date Range by checking the Include Unavailable option in the Additional Criteria section. A Project Manager can also control the display of Skills for each person in the list by choosing a value from the Show Skills radio box group.

List Records

The resulting list of people will look as follows:

The header information for this page includes the project name for which the planning is being done, the requested date range, the total number of business hours in that date range and the number of hours required for planning.

The list of people includes an available person’s name, a short summary of their work load in the specified date range and, optionally, may include a list of person’s skills. Again, based on the options selected on the previous screen, the list may contain people with zero Available Hours.

By clicking the pencil icon, a Project Manager can proceed with creating a planned work item for an individual user.

Create Planned Work

The Project Manager will be presented with the following screen after clicking the pencil icon for one of the people in the list.

The header section of this page contains the following information:

Project - the name of project for which the person is being planned. This project was specified by the Project Manager in the initial selection criteria screen (see Find Records).

Person - the name and user name of the person being planned.

Person Bill Rate - the person's default Bill Rate. The value for this field may not be present. It is only available if the default bill rate has been specified by the Administrator in the person's profile.

Person Cost Rate - the person's default Cost Rate. The value for this field may not be present. It is only available if the default cost rate has been specified by the Administrator in the person's profile.

Default Labor Category - the person's default Labor Category. The value for this field may not be present. It is only available if the default labor category has been specified by the Administrator in the person's profile.

Date Range - the date range for which the person in being planned. This date range was specified by the Project Manager in the initial selection criteria (see Find Records).

Business Hours in Date Range - the number of business hours between the begin and end date of the Date Range (including the begin and end days). The value for this field is calculated based on the definition of the Business Week maintained by the Administrator. If the date range contained no business hours (e.g. a person is being planned for Saturday and Sunday only), the value for this field will be set to zero.

Available Hours in Date Range - the number of "unplanned' or available for planning hours the person has in the date range. If the person is already fully booked, the value for this field will be set to zero. If the person is overbooked, the value for this field will be negative.

Hours Planning - the number of hours the person is being planned for. This number was specified by the Project Manager in the initial selection criteria (see Find Records). Alternatively, a Project Manager may have specified a percentage of time they wish the person to spend on this project. In that case the number of hours will be set to the number of hours that constitute the requested percentage of the business hours in the date range.

The detail section of this page contains all planned work entries created for this person for this project. If the planned work was created at the task level, the planned work displayed will be only for the still open tasks.

Each line item in the detail section contains the following information:

Task - the list of Tasks available on the project. This list may be empty if no tasks were defined for the project.

Begin Date - the date the person is expected to start working on the project/task for this planned work item. The value for this field must be specified.

End Date - the date the person is expected to finish working on the project/task for this planned work item. The value for this field must be specified.

Note: no two rows for the same project and task may have overlapping dates.

Hours - the number of hours the person is expected to work on the project/task during the time frame defined by the begin and end dates. The value for this field must be specified.

Block Out - allows the Project Manager to reserve the days in the date range specified by the begin and end dates for the current project/task. By reserving the days for this entry the Project Manager will mark these days as unavailable for any other planned time entry that overlaps the date range. However, the Project Manager may overbook a person during the blocked out period if he/she chooses to do so.

Labor Category - the labor category in which the person is expected to work on the project/task. This field is optional.

Bill Rate - the bill rate at which the person is expected to work on the project/task. This field is optional. Note: depending on the value of the unasource.allow_bill_rate_edit. property, you may not be able to make modifications to the values in this field. In the example above this field is not editable and hence it is grayed out.

Cost Rate - the cost rate at which the person is expected to work on the project/task. This field is optional. Note: depending on the value of the unasource.allow_cost_rate_edit. property, you may not be able to make modifications to the values in this field. In the example above this field is not editable and hence it is grayed out.

Location - the location at which the person is expected to work on the project. This field is optional.

To aid in the data entry process, a new line, based on the information provided by the Project Manager, will be automatically generated and displayed at the bottom of the list. The new entry will be identified by a red asterisk. The following items on the new entry will be pre-populated:

Begin Date - will be set to the first day of the Date Range.

End Date - will be set to the last day of the Date Range.

Hours - will be set to Hours Planning.

Labor Category - will be set to the person's default labor category if it was defined. This field will not contain a value if the person's default labor category was not defined.

Bill Rate / Cost Rate - the value for these fields may come from the person's default rate or the labor category default rate. If the person has a default labor category and the labor category has a default rate, it will be used. If the person has a default labor category but the labor category has no default rate, this field will be blank. If the person has no default labor category and has a default rate, the person's default rate will be used. Otherwise, the rate will be left blank. Please note that the two rates will be used as a pair and at no time the automatically generated row will be set to contain one rate from the person and one from the labor category.

The Project Manager may change any of the pre-populated values.

The Project Manager may choose to delete any of the existing rows. This can be done by clicking the icon for a given row. The Project Manager may choose to add new rows. This can be done by clicking the icon. By default one new row will be added. By overriding the number in the input field next to this icon, the Project Manager may specify a different number of new rows to be added.

All changes performed by the Project Manager will become permanent when the button is pressed.

Once the Project Manager is satisfied with the work plan, he/she may choose to either return to the list of people by pressing the button, or create the actual assignments based on the planned work by pressing the button.

Note: when the Assign button is pressed all unsaved work will be saved before the Assign Planned Work page is displayed.

Assign Planned Work

The Project Manager will be presented with the following screen:

This screen will contain all the information from the previous screen plus the following:

Assign check box - the Project Manager will identify which of the plan work items should be transferred into an assignment by checking the Assign check box.
A new line representing the existing assignment for this person, project and/or task. If the existing assignment was done at the project level, the line that represents it will appear after all of the planned work items. If the existing assignment was done at the task level, the line that represents it will appear after the planned work items for this task. An example of the task level existing assignments is shown below. This line will contain a labor category, bill rate, cost rate and location from the existing assignment. If the existing assignment uses person's defaults for a given field, it's value will appear in the default font color. If the default was overridden, the value will appear in red. If no value was provided or no existing assignment was found (which is equivalent to no values were provided for any of these fields), the field will contain "---".

If the project is identified as requiring project level assignments but the planning was done at the task level, the Project Manager will be asked to select one task level planned work item.

If the project is identified as requiring task level assignments but the planning was done at the project level, the assignment will not be permitted.

If more than one planned work item was created for the same task, the Project Manager will be asked to select one to be converted into an assignment.

Click here to learn more about the assignments and overrides.

Return to Unanet Table of Contents page