Understanding Resource Pools

Organizations can have hundreds to thousands of resources that make up the supply side of the capacity planning model. Resource pools provide a mechanism to organize supply in a meaningful way to support capacity planning. You can group resources in any configuration to support your operations.

Resource pools are defined in a hierarchy to establish relationships between different resource pools and allow for roll-up analytics and reporting. You can model the resource pool structure to your organizational structure, for example, using human resource (HR) departments. However, the way that you categorize and manage your resources from a capacity standpoint may vary greatly from your organizational structure. Pools may go down to a lower level of granularity or be grouped in a different way to provide the desired analysis and reporting necessary for effective decision making. Pools are rarely static because new pools are added and others are inactivated. Pool managers can change, pool hierarchy can be reorganized, and resources can be transferred between pools.

Pools can contain generic resources as placeholders for future capacity. This future capacity could represent a known increase in headcount due to hiring more employee resources or obtaining contractors to fulfill future demand. At some point, the pool manager replaces each generic resource with a named resource.

You can use resource pools to filter resources on the Staffing Workbench and during express searching for resources. You can also use resource pools for approval workflow routing, where pool managers act as resource managers and control the use of the resources in their pools. During system implementation or reorganization of resource pools, an administrator creates pools and associates them in the pool hierarchy.

Typically, there are two functional roles that are associated with resource pools—pool administrator and pool manager. This table discusses each role's tasks in the process:

Role	Responsibility
Pool Administrator	Manages the overall pool hierarchy, has access to all resource pools, and manages reorganizations. Responsibilities include: Creating pools and the pool hierarchy during implementation and reorganizations, which can occur frequently. Assigning or modifying pool managers. Transferring resources between pools. Modifying resource data in pools, such as start dates, end dates, capacity percent, and so on). Inactivating pools, moving pools within the hierarchy, or overwriting the entire pool hierarchy.
Pool Manager	Owns and manages the resource pools and the resources within their pools. Responsibilities include: Transferring resources between pools. Modifying resource data within resource pools. Approving generic resource requests.

Role

Responsibility

Pool Administrator

Manages the overall pool hierarchy, has access to all resource pools, and manages reorganizations. Responsibilities include:

Creating pools and the pool hierarchy during implementation and reorganizations, which can occur frequently.
Assigning or modifying pool managers.
Transferring resources between pools.
Modifying resource data in pools, such as start dates, end dates, capacity percent, and so on).
Inactivating pools, moving pools within the hierarchy, or overwriting the entire pool hierarchy.

Pool Manager

Owns and manages the resource pools and the resources within their pools. Responsibilities include:

Transferring resources between pools.
Modifying resource data within resource pools.
Approving generic resource requests.