Group capacity planning
There is a nice function on how to make from Resource management a handy tool for capacity planning of:
- general group capacity planning of future workload
- production machines
- client's workload
- users without access into Easy Project
This helps you to plan not only capacities of Easy Project users but also any other sources as just mentioned, without the need to create fictional users in the system. You may find this especially helpful when planning a general group capacity for future workload, working on a project that requires an involvement of some external machines such as in agriculture, engineering and other areas, during a highly time-consuming cooperation with a client, or when planning a capacity for any users without access into Easy Project. Moreover, you can easily create a report of planned estimated time for this machine/client and hand it to a competent person for information purposes. Here are steps to reproduce.
In Global menu >> Administration >> Groups, create an empty group of users that represents a machine, client, or users without access into Easy Project. Name the group after its purpose (such as tractor or company car) and add no users as members of this group as illustrated below.
Open global Resource Management >> Resource settings - Show groups and update settings as illustrated below. This enables to see the just created group within the user's list of Resource Management.
Moreover, in Resource settings you can also set an hour limit per day for this group (machine, client) to prevent it from overloading by too many assigned tasks at one time.
Finally, open Resource Management to find the created group there in the user's list. Now, you can drag a task and assign it to the empty group which means the task will be performed by a machine, client or anything else the group represents. Since the group contains no users, no one else but the group will be assigned with the task. There is no need to create any fictional users for this purpose, as groups fulfill such a need well enough.
