Updated 27th December 2024
Effective resource planning is a cornerstone of successful project management, ensuring that team members with the right skills and availability are allocated to tasks efficiently. PSOhub offers powerful features to facilitate this process, such as the Resource Planning feature.
Click the tour below to get an overview of the Resource Planning feature from your project.
To get a more detailed understanding, please refer to the rest of the article below.
In this article, we'll be covering how to make use of Resource Planning without an existing budget. To learn how to leverage your project's budget as a baseline for resource planning, refer to the article Calculate your budget and feed the resource planning.
Plan resources and hours for a project
In order to plan and allocate the resources for a project, you will want to access the Resource Planning feature. In your project, go to the Contract tab and click on the Resource Planning button.
Note: When planning resources, your project needs to have at least one contract line setup on the project.
Before you begin, please validate that Resource Planning shows the Planned view:
If Actuals is selected, this will show information on Resource Planning relating to booked hours from actual time entries entered by time entries.
When setting up Resource Planning, you have the option to bring in all contract lines from the project at once, or you can manually add particular contract lines. Both options are explained below:
Add all contract lines automatically
Click the ellipsis (...) button and click Add all lines to bring all the contract lines into Resource Planning.
Once you have all your contract lines set up, these lines become resource planning lines and you can start defining them based on resources or roles. To do this, click on the Add line button.
Add single contract lines manually
Click on Add contract line to define a single contract line.
Once added, a Calculation line window will appear, where you can select the relevant contract line that you'd like to plan resources for. Once selected, click Save.
Once saved, the new contract line will appear on the Resource Planning page. You can add resources or roles against this contract line by clicking on Add line underneath the contract line.
Assigning resources or roles
Once clicking on Add line, the Schedule pop-up window appears prompting you to select the type of scheduling required:
Manual Scheduling - Allows you to manually assign a resource or role to the planned hours.
Copilot Scheduling - Activates the AI-powered project assistant to determine resource availability based on the planned hours.
Manual Scheduling
The Add/Edit resource dialog window appears. Complete the required fields as explained below:
Fill out the fields using the table below as a guide:
Field | Description |
Available project members | Select a resource already added as a team member in the project's Teams tab. |
Other available resources (select a role first) | This is not mandatory.
Add resource(s) available in your organization but not already a team member for the project, by first selecting the required role. |
Project role | Select the role (which will determine the rate used for this budget line) |
Description | This not mandatory.
Enter a description that explains the purpose of this role. |
Selling rate | This field will automatically be populated by the rate of the resource or project role you will have selected earlier. |
Click Save.
The new line will display on the Resource Planning view.
Note: To add multiple budget lines under the same Contract line, click on the Add Line button again and follow the same steps above.
The example below, shows contract lines with roles and resources added. An explanation of all of the fields is also described:
Field | Description |
Planned | Actuals | These are toggle buttons:
Planned displays planned hours  Actuals displays the number of hours booked by team members in comparison to the planned hours  |
To be planned | This value will only show if a budget has been defined for the project and it shows the number of budgeted hours yet to be planned. If you have chosen to plan resources before setting a budget, this will not appear on the Resource Planning page.  |
Day | Week | Month | Hours can be planned on a day, week or month level. Simply click on the relevant button to change the view.  |
Available | The total remaining hours vs available capacity per resource across all projects. Below, we see there are 48 hours available from the total 2096 hours based on the resource's capacity as configured in the user settings:  Should a resource be over-planned, the available hours will be shown as a negative value:  |
Total | As the planned hours are distributed on a day, week or month level, those hours will be displayed in the Total column.  |
Total this year | Under the Planned view, the total planned hours is displayed per day, per week or per month.
Under the Actuals view, the total planned and used hours are displayed per day, per week or per month. |
Planning hours for your resources and roles
Now that you have your contract lines and resources set up on the Resource Planning view, you can go about planning hours for your resources.
The year can be broken down for planning in 3 different views: Month, Week or Day.
Monthly View
To access the Monthly View, click on the Month button in the top-left corner of the Resource Planning view:
In this view, the calendar year is broken down by months, from January to December. To navigate to a past or future year, use the left or right arrow buttons.
In the fields below each respective month, you can enter the number of hours that you would expect the resource or role to complete towards that particular contract line. To easily navigate from one month to another, use the Tab key on your keyboard.
Important: As hours are entered on the Monthly View, these hours will be evenly split across all weeks of the month and all days of the month. It's a good idea to check both the Weekly and Daily Views once you have entered hours on the Monthly View.
Important: to remove a value in the grid, you must enter a 0 in the field, to override the previous value. Pressing the backspace or Delete will not remove the current value.
Weekly View
To access the Weekly View, click on the Week button in the top-left corner of the Resource Planning view.
Alternatively, you can click on any of the 12 months to open the Weekly View on the selected month.
In the Weekly View, the month selected is broken down into weeks. To navigate to a past or future month, use the left and right arrow buttons.
Note: For some months there may be weeks which overlap with other months. Such weeks will appear in the Weekly View for both months. For example, Week 22 includes dates from both May and June, so will be included under both May and June.
Important: As hours are entered on the Weekly View, these will be evenly split across all days of the week and will also contribute to the planned hours for the month. It's a good idea to check both the Daily and Monthly Views once hours have been entered on the Weekly View.
Daily View
To access the Daily View, click on the Day button in the top-left corner of the Resource Planning view:
Alternatively, you can click on any of the weeks for a particular month to open the Daily View on the selected week.
In the Daily View, the selected week is broken down into individual working days from Monday to Friday. To navigate to a past or future week, use the left and right arrow buttons.
Important: When planning hours on the Daily View, note that the total hours planned will contribute to both the planned hours for the week and the planned hours for the month. It's a good idea to check both the Weekly and Monthly Views once hours have been planned on the Daily View.
Copilot scheduling
Instead of manual resource scheduling, PSOhub's Copilot provides a self-driving solution for allocating resources. For projects, where available resources are unknown, the resource planning may resemble the example below, where roles and resources are displayed. To find the best available resources, click on Add line:
The Schedule resource window appears with a list of resources across your organization.
Note that the copilot scheduling is available in the month view only. In the contract line, enter the planned hours required for a resource for the month(s):
The window will refresh and only resources with availability
Total Hours, Available Hours and Total Amounts
To the left of each contract line, you'll find the Total and Available figures:
Total: the total number of hours planned for this resource or role for the given week (on Daily View), month (on Weekly View) or year (on Monthly View)
Available: this represents the total capacity remaining for this resource. This figure takes into account all hours planned for the resource over all projects and also takes into account internal time, absences and holidays. This figure will change depending on whether you're in Monthly, Weekly or Daily View.
At the bottom of each contract line in the Planned view, you'll find the total number of planned hours, along with the associated Amount for each month (based on the selling rate for the resource or role).
At the very bottom of the Resource Planning view are the grand totals of planned hours and billable amounts.
Scheduling planned hours for a role
When planning hours for a role where no resource has been assigned, the Schedule button will appear under the Available column.
This allows any planned hours for a role to be assigned to a specific resource who meets the role criteria. To find an appropriate resource, click on the Schedule button. This will open the Schedule Role Overview:
This overview will list all resources who have the role and it will assign a Match % figure based on their current availability.
Actual hours on the Resource Planning view
Once you start booking hours towards a project, you can use the Actuals view on Resource Planning to compare booked hours with planned hours.
To do this, click on Actuals in the top-left corner of the Resource Planning view.
Instead of showing planned hours, actual hours that have been booked against the project will be displayed for easy comparison.
Below each contract line will be a Planned vs Used grand total. In situations where the number of planned hours has been exceeded, the actual hours will show in red.
To compare amounts instead of hours, click on the Amount button in the top-left.
This will display the actual amounts in your company currency.
As with the actual hours, where the planned amount has been exceeded, the actual amount will show in red.
Return to project
When you've finished planning your project's resources, you can navigate back to the project by clicking on the orange back arrow, or alternatively click on the project name in the top-left corner.
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