Clarity

Has anyone ever found a good use for Parent Role?

• No out of the box reports, portlets or metrics use Parent Role that I'm aware of
• No means of preventing resources from being added to Parent Roles, when assigning Primary Roles, only, is required - all roles (I.e. primary, parents, grandparents) show on Primary Role, Team Role (Staff OBS) and Task Role pick lists.
• Although one can have more than two levels defined (e.g a parent can have its own parent (grand-parent role) and a grand parent role can have its own parent (great grand-parent), there are no out of the box views of this hierarchy nor out of the box processes that automatically build a Role OBS from this data (unlike Departments and Locations)

I'm about to recommend abandoning the Parent Role attribute, eliminating parent role values altogether and removing the attribute from views, filters, etc.

What to use in its place?  A custom Role OBS.

• Can force that roles be placed on end-branches
• Only primary roles will be available on Resource Create/Edit screens for assignment to resources (Poke-Yoke'd)
• Can have more that two levels defined
• Role OBS shows up as an attribute that can be added to views, filters
• Role OBS can be exported to Excel, then imported to Visio to see hierarchy structure

Had thought about building a process to generate the Role OBS from the Parents assigned to roles, just as Department and Location OBSs are built.  But, there is still then the problem of not being able to limit role selection to primary roles when assigning to resources.

Seems to me that Parent Role has negative value, that a Role OBS meets our needs better.

Anyone have a different experience?  We're about to use primary roles a lot more seriously than in the past, for planning and costing projects - perhaps Parent Role meant something more in the past, before CA PPM generated OBS attributes that can be displayed in views.  Today, it appears to me that a Role OBS can obsolete the Parent Role attribute.

What do you think?

Dale

I like your idea of a Role OBS.  In the past, I looked at using parent roles as the less granular version (e.g. Business Analyst) and then having more detailed child roles (breaking out by experience level and geographic location if applicable).  A project manager could staff a project with either, depending on how much detail he or she had (e.g. needing a highly experienced analyst vs. any analyst, needing resources in a specific location vs. any location).  

The parent role would have a blended rate that combined all levels and all geographies, so would be very general, while the more specific roles could be defined with both experience level and geography in mind, so would be much more specific. This would enable initial very high-level planning and forecasting, and added accuracy as specificity is added.

Skills could be added to the roles at various levels to define what skills/knowledge a Senior Business Analyst should have vs. an Associate Business Analyst.

Interesting usage.  When picking roles to place on projects, how do you differentiate parent roles from child roles?  Naming convention?

This was a model we were looking at, we didn't actually implement it.  We actively used one set of very specific roles (e.g. Senior Business Analyst - North America) with associated blended rates.  The downside was that if you didn't know where you would staff the role, or what level team member you would get, your forecast would be off.  This is why we were looking at parent roles, in combination with looking at resource requisitions, but I don't believe they ever made the transition.  (I'm no longer with that organization.)