Role List Overview

Roles represent personnel job titles or skills needed to execute projects. Examples of roles include architect, general laborer, quality assurance tester, and engineer. You can establish an unlimited number of roles and organize them in a hierarchy for easier management and organization.

You can associate roles with individual resources that fulfill the role's skill requirements. For example, you may have three people that can perform the role of carpenter. After associating these three resources with the carpenter role, you can indicate each resource's proficiency level and whether this is their primary role. A primary role is the main role the resource is currently performing and will be assigned to an activity at the same time the resource is assigned. The proficiency level describes the resource's skill level in that role. When you are ready to assign roles to perform work on project activities, you can review their proficiencies to decide who should be assigned.

Roles can be directly assigned to perform the work on activities, or they can be used in conjunction with their associated resources. During the early stages of a project, you may only know the general work requirements of each activity. You can assign the roles that each activity may need, such as foreman, plumber, or painter. Later, when you know which specific resources can be assigned to work on the activity, you can staff each role with an associated resource. Any combination of direct assignment and staffing roles with resources is supported.

Roles can be added to a role list at the workspace level or the project level. Add roles at the workspace level when more than one project in the workspace will use the same roles. Add roles at the project level when the roles are only needed for a single project. A role added at the project level can later be promoted to the project's parent workspace to make it available to other projects in the workspace. When associating roles with resources, they must be owned by the same workspace or project.

All roles can have multiple availability periods defined to reflect the varying amounts of work a role is able to perform. Each availability period supports up to five pay rates, which represent the cost of the role in a given work period. See Understanding Role Availability and Rates for more information.

Portfolio Resource Planning

Forecasting Resource Demand Video

Resource planning at the portfolio level is performed by reviewing the labor requirements of the workspace roles assigned to the projects in the portfolio, choosing the best project selection scenario that maximizes the portfolio's value, and committing labor units to the projects selected for execution. The objective of resource planning is to select projects that maximize portfolio value without overallocating the resources assigned to perform the project work.

Before you can begin portfolio resource planning, you should create workspace roles, assign them to the Resource Demand page, and specify the labor units for each project.