Resource Scheduling Overview

Overview

At Kantata, we know that effectively managing and allocating your teams’ tasks, hours, and project schedules can be a daunting task. That’s why our resource management functionality allows you to merge your high-level resourcing strategy with the day-to-day planning that a project manager does at the task level.

The goal behind resource management is to improve visibility for key decision makers by providing an “at a glance” overview of showing how utilized team members are at any given time. Depending on how your organization is set up, you may use a combination of different hour types to achieve these goals.

In Kantata OX, allocated hours are used to serve as a guide on assigning scheduled hours. Allocated hours are more of a rough cut, or white board, of hours to "hold" for resources at the project level. There is no communication reported to team members regarding allocated hours and allocated hours are always managed in the Resource Center.

Scheduled hours are considered committed hours for resources to work. These hours are scheduled at the task level within a project and are broken down to the number of hours per day that a team member should be working on each specific task. Depending on your needs and permissions, you can manage scheduled hours from the Task Tracker, the Resourcing tab in the workspace, or the Resource Center.

Tip: In the weekly Schedule view in Kantata OX (Time & Expense > Schedule > Weekly), you can see all of your tasks that have scheduled hours and select Auto-fill Scheduled Hours to copy an entire week’s scheduled hours and submit them to your Timesheet.

Scheduling Hours on a Task

To add or revise scheduled hours in the project workspace, you need to have the ability to schedule hours for yourself or others. You can view and update scheduled hours on a task at any time by opening the Task Details side panel and locating the Scheduling section.

Within this section, you can enter the number of hours per day that resources should be scheduled for the task.

Tip: You can quickly update scheduled hours assignments for multiple tasks in a project if each task already has resource estimated hours. Use the Distribute Scheduled Hours bulk action in the Task Tracker to distribute scheduled hours evenly between the start and due date of a task.

Scheduling Hours in a Single Project

Note: When the new Resourcing tab is enabled, scheduling hours within a project works the same as it does in the Resource Center. For more information, see New Project Resourcing [Early Access].

The Resourcing tab in the project workspace gives you a high-level view of all of the work assigned to resources within a project. To manage scheduled hours from the Resourcing tab, you need to have the ability to schedule hours for yourself or others.

Tip: You can quickly update scheduled hours assignments for tasks that have resource estimated hours. Use the Resource Shaping tool to create scheduled hours based on resource estimated hours and choose whether to distribute evenly, front-load, backload, or schedule a set amount per day.

Scheduling Hours across Projects

The Resource Center allows you to see a resource’s schedule across projects. The timeline allows you to take into account allocated hours on the project, scheduled hours on other projects, start and due dates for tasks, and other task information.

To manage scheduled hours in the Resource Center, you need to have scheduled hours permissions via the Resource Management access group set.

Tip: You can quickly update scheduled hours assignments for tasks that have resource estimated hours. In the task row, select the More (“   ”) icon, then choose Distribute Hours to distribute scheduled hours evenly between the start and due date of a task.

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