First, you need to identify the people interacting with Resource Management and how the different roles can be assigned to those people.
Permission level | Details |
|---|---|
Resourcing Admin, Portfolio Editor, People Scheduler, Portfolio Reporter, Portfolio Viewer | Give only to people who will oversee the whole organization, as these are account-wide permission levels |
Project Editor | Use for people managing projects so they can only see the details of projects they own or are assigned. |
Contractor | Use for people working on projects. This permission level restricts them from seeing their assignments and tracking their time. They can't see what anyone else is doing. |
Project Membership | Provide additional stakeholders with access to just the projects in their department. |
When a user modifies data in Resource Management, the API automatically reflects those changes in Smartsheet regardless of whether they have access to the connected project sheet.
Learn more about the various permission levels in Resource Management.
Import people
Upload a CSV in account settings to import or update multiple people at once.
Placeholders
Placeholders are not people or emails. They are just the mechanism for identifying the resources needed in a project. Placeholders don't count toward availability. If you are focused on utilization, use a managed resource. Use placeholders to schedule a project when you don’t yet know who will be performing the work. Like people, placeholders can have a role, discipline, and a custom bill rate, so you can see how their assignments impact your project budgets. Learn more about placeholders.
Managed and unmanaged resources
Managed Resources represent things you need for your project. They can be human resources or material resources such as cars, offices, rooms, etc. They cannot log in, view, or track time in Resource Management, but adding them creates a clear picture of the capacity of your group, allowing you to forecast risk. You can create resources to represent meeting rooms or equipment. This way, you know when certain meeting rooms are booked and when certain pieces of equipment will be unavailable.
If you use the Smartsheet integration, each Managed Resource needs a legitimate email address associated with it. If you are not using the Smartsheet integration, then you can create a placeholder email address such as truck1@yourcompany.com, truck2@yourcompany.com, etc. for your Managed Resources.
Learn more about managed resources.
Roles and disciplines
Assigning roles and disciplines to people allows you to set up bill rates for roles and disciplines that people can automatically adopt from your bill rate matrix. In Reports, you can use role and discipline to analyze your team. Learn more about assigning roles and disciplines.
Location
Location is used to identify people in different Geo zones, buildings, etc. Create a standard list of locations where your resources reside. Use locations if you need to consider a resource's physical location when choosing work assignments.
Only one location can be assigned to people. If more locations are needed, consider using people custom fields. The location is only an attribute for people. To identify a location per project, create a project custom field instead.
People tags and custom fields
Use people custom fields instead of people tags because people tags are not standardized.If Resource Management is used to manage non-human resources, create a people custom field that identifies the resource as non-human.If you want to be able to filter data using custom fields, you must indicate this each time a new custom field is added.
Archive, modify, and delete people
Before archiving a person, add the last day of work so they don't show on the utilization report. You must archive a person before you can delete them. Once a person’s profile is deleted, all data associated with that person will be deleted from Resource Management and cannot be restored. Learn more about archiving, modifying, and deleting people.