Resources and capacity: overview

Summary: Every LYNX-X article on resources and capacity, grouped by what you want to do.

In LYNX-X, this topic covers what you need to set up skills, people and calendars, assign people to work and check the load across projects. Go straight to the part you need: every article says what it is for and how long it takes to read.

In this topic

Set up skills and resources

The skill, resource and team model, and how to create skills and resources.

Understand

• Understanding the skill, resource and team model: resources and skills have a many-to-many relationship in LYNX, and properties let you narrow a skill down to the specific competency a task needs. About 3 minutes of reading.

Do

• Configuring skills and resources: find the skills and resources already in the space, and add, edit or remove a skill from a resource. About 2 minutes of reading.

Calendars and availability

Working time, part-time people, absences, and which calendar a task follows.

Understand

• Which calendar a task follows: a task's working time comes from the calendar of whoever does the work (the resource behind a skill, or a Virtual skill's own calendar), while the project's calendar and Hours per day decide how that time is counted in days. About 5 minutes of reading.
• What 100 % means: choosing how to model availability: three settings can each stand for "100 %" (the working day, a resource's netto availability and an assignment's units). This article follows one person who gives 75 % of his time to projects through four ways of modelling it, so you can choose the one that fits how your team plans. About 7 minutes of reading.
• Working with unit percentages: units is the share of an assignment's hours that a resource actually contributes. It is the number that turns a span of days into an amount of work. About 3 minutes of reading.

Do

• Setting up a calendar: create a calendar that defines an organisation's working hours and non-working days, so that projects, resources and skills can be scheduled against it. About 3 minutes of reading.
• Setting a resource's non-availability period: add a specific exception to a resource's availability (a holiday or other absence) separately from their assigned calendar. About 2 minutes of reading.

Assign people to work

Choose between a skill and a named person, and firm up assignments when the work gets close.

Do

• Converting a soft assignment to a hard assignment: confirm LYNX-X's recommended resource into a named one, by choosing the resource yourself, or by letting the start of the task do it for you. About 4 minutes of reading.
• Pre-selecting a resource pool for a project: narrow a project down to a maximum number of resources, or a named selection, before assignments are made (a "dream team" pre-selection). About 3 minutes of reading.

Check workload across projects

See where demand exceeds capacity and what one person is committed to.

Look up

• Reading multi-project resource load: the resource load view in Project Portfolio shows average load per skill across projects, and can unfold to the underlying resources and their non-availability periods. About 3 minutes of reading.

Learn it step by step

These learning paths use the articles in this topic, in an order for your first session:

• Learning path: Manage skills, people and capacity: Set up skills and people so that LYNX-X plans with the capacity you really have, and see where projects ask more of a skill than your people can give.