Understanding Role Availability and Rates

You can define multiple availability periods and pay rates for individual roles to reflect realistic variations in a role's schedule. If you are using roles for high-level project planning before assigning specific resources, you can use role rates to estimate costs for different job types and skill levels. The specific resources you associate with each role may have more accurate availability and rate data.

An individual role's availability can vary over time due to factors such as multiple commitments or seasonal availability. You can specify as many periods as necessary to model each role's availability. For each period, enter an effective start date and the maximum work units the role can perform within a single work period. For example, a role available to work a full day may have a Max Units/Time value of 8h/d, or 100%. A role with limited availability may only be able to work 4h/d, or 50%.

Units/Time values are measured against the time periods in the role's calendar. For example, if the calendar's Hours/Day setting is 8, and your preferences are set to show unit and duration labels of hours and days, then entering a max unit/time value of 100% would equate to 8h/d, depending on your units/time format preference. Entering 120% would equate to 10h/d. Unit and duration labels, as well as the format for Units/Time, are set in the user preferences. Units/Time values can be entered as a ratio or percentage and will be automatically converted to your format preference.

Separate role availability is defined in each workspace and project where the role is available. When you assign work availability to a role at the project level, the role's project usage is measured against its project availability. When you assign work availability to the same role at the workspace level, the role's usage on all projects to which it is assigned rolls up and is measured against its workspace availability. For example, if a role has varying levels of availability at each level, the role may be overallocated in Project A, 100% allocated in Project B, but still have availability at the parent workspace level. When entering availability values, consider if the role may be assigned to activities in other projects at the same time and may need to split their availability.

When a role availability or rate is assigned and then modified, you have the option to keep the modified availability and rate separate or Synchronize Role Availability and Rates with other roles which are further down the workspace hierarchy. This type of synchronization is done directly from the Roles List page or at the Synchronize All Resource and Role Availability and Rates by an application administrator.

For each availability period you can specify up to five different rate types. While some roles may have a single standard rate at all times, other roles may have separate standard, internal, and external rates. A role's rates are used to compute costs for any activities to which the role is assigned. Separate role rates can be defined in each workspace and project where the resource is available. The label for each rate type can be customized in the Resource/Role object settings.

Because roles can be used as placeholders for specific resources, you can use role rates to estimate the cost of a particular role assignment. When a role is staffed with a resource, the assignment can be adjusted to either use the role's pay rate or the resource's pay rate. Resource and role rates are used to calculate the cost of each activity to which they are assigned.