Clarity

Team, I wanted to pick everyone's brains on resource role management to obtain some parallel perspective on how other orgs are operating their resource roles.

A decently consolidated roles master is key to properly capture functions and skill sets of resources in PPM.

I have seen two variations:

1. In bigger financial orgs, where there are several business units, they had the habit of localizing their roles. This is also a habit that was formed prior to version 13 when you can do only 2 groupings in the cost plan group by. And the best we could fit into the two happened to be:

1. Trans class / Role

2. Role / Charge Code

3. Trans Class / Resource Class

2. In other places, the roles are pretty much commonly named and they use OBS units and other forms in the team tab to denote resources/allocations who are currently doing the work in the project.

I worked in a bank where in order to differentiate by departments, they created copies of roles. For example, two groups - options and forex trading groups had their IT roles like:

OT App Developer

FX App Developer

When both of them constituted the same role. This poses some challenges to cross-range demand/capacity management when FX needs to borrow a resource from OT to staff a project, and then the PM/RM collectively managing both sets of resources and perform forecast utilization and other advanced things like that.

With version 13 and beyond, since we have the capability to include an OBS unit in the cost plan and have staff obs unit in the team tab, we can literally get away with having one role called App Developer and trading the role across departments or staff OBSes via the staff obs unit and such.

I am looking to propose a consolidated range of resource roles which will have common names without any department abbreviations prefixed before them.

Is anyone willing to share how their roles master is structured and how it is working for them. I would love to heard your thoughts.

Thanks!!!

We are setting up for Role and Department based planning, forecasting, actual transactions tracking.  Prior, we were only using Transaction Class, where classes described labor by region (USA, Germany, etc.).

Our uniform list or roles is going through an update.  Our roles have been global and this will remain - we are only updating role names, consolidating some, creating some new.

One thing that is different is that we will now have 3 levels of roles - grand-parent, parent and primary.  These 3 levels were desired for reporting purposes.

One problem:  The browse role lookup windows display all roles, regardless of level, not just primary.  This is a problem if your parent and grand-parent roles are intended for grouping purposes in reports, only - nothing prevents users from assigning these to resources, team and/or task roles.

Tired of waiting on CA to allow customer configuration of system provided lookups, we gave up - we modified our role lookups so that they only present primary roles to our users for selection.  Yes, it means we will have to restore the original lookups for upgrades, troubleshooting, etc. and then put our modifications back in afterwards.  But the errors produced by letting users see/pick things they were not supposed to were not surmountable through training and surveillance - these are non-value added activities when one can Poke-Yoke the system to prevent user errors!

We've tested the creation of Cost Plans using primary roles allocated to Team\Staff, with Department OBS values select in Staff OBS column and Department based labor rates in Rate Matrix - works perfectly.

Your probably already considering this, but you didn't mention it, so I'll mention it here, just in case:  Skills.  If the skill sets for FX and OT are different, then you may need separate roles.  In our world, the skill sets for an Engineer-Mechanical working on a brake rotor can be quite different than an Engineer-Mechanical working on a anti-lock brake valve system.  If you don't intend to use Skills feature, this may not matter.

Looking forward to hear what others are doing.  Good topic!