How To Use Resourcing To Allocate Your Team’s Time by Project
In Hive, you can review your project team’s capacity to make sure you are resourcing your projects appropriately. Maintaining visibility over your team’s availability is key to delivering projects successfully, on time and on budget. Luckily, Hive makes it easy to resource your projects right within your project management and collaboration platform.
To utilize Resourcing in Hive, you’ll first have to make sure the App is turned on. Head over to the Apps section on the left navigation panel of your Hive dashboard and enable ‘Resourcing.’ Note that if you are using Hive Solo (Hive’s freemium plan) you will need to upgrade to Hive Teams to access this app.
Note that for non-Enterprise teams, only admins can enable this add-on. And as with all other Hive apps, you can pin Resourcing to your left-hand navigation bar to access it quickly going forward.
Now let’s explore how you can plan and resource your team’s time with the Hive Resourcing app.
Resourcing options in Hive
Hive supports time and effort estimates at both the Action and Project level:
1. Action level estimates
Resourcing estimates at the Action level is more granular in detail, letting you estimate how long each task or step within the project plan will take. To make use of the Resourcing feature at the action level, actions will need to have some key information filled in:
- Assignee (i.e., who is responsible for this action)
- Estimate (i.e., the estimated time we expect this action to take)
- Due Date (and start date if spanning multiple days)
Note: You must also have the Hive Time-tracking app toggled on. To check this, go to your ‘Apps’ dashboard and ensure Time-tracking activated. Action-based estimates can now be added per person per action card.
Estimates are always attached to specific actions so that team members can check off their ‘My actions’ list. Estimates act as a guide to help assignees to allocate time to each of their specific actions. With estimated time, you can set different levels for different days using the calendar option in Time-tracking within the action card. You can always adjust the time and dates that you want to allocate to an action.
2. Project level estimates
Project level estimates let you use Resource Assignments to attribute estimates per person, per project. To create an assignment, click and drag a timeframe in the calendar and let go of your button, this will create an assignment.
Choose the Project you wish to assign a task to, the people involved, add any relevant notes, and finally, recheck your dates. You can then allocate time by percentage, hours per day, total hours, or days.
Then set the value – for example, four hours per day during the set timeframe. Check the ‘Confirm assignment’ box and click Create! The project will now appear in your Resourcing calendar.
You can also combine both ways of entering estimates. Simply select them from the filter types in the top-right dropdown menu. Handy tip: color-coding projects will make them easier to find at a glance in the calendar.
How to check your team’s capacity with Resourcing
By default, resourcing times and percentages are based a working day being 8 hours per day. If that doesn’t apply to your team, you will first need to set availabilities for each team member.
To adjust the maximum number of working hours and note which days someone is available, click on a Team member’s name on the left side of the dashboard. Near the end of the card there is an Availability section. You can set a date range for a custom availability, and then add the values here.
You will see then your team’s capacity against the estimated allocated time in the Resourcing calendar. You can choose to view time by either hours or percentages based on each person’s capacity.
So, if a team member’s time is marked in blue, their estimated time fits within their capacity. However, if it’s red, that means their time is over-indexed within that action or project delivery timeframe.
You can head into Settings under ‘General’ and change the time to percentages to see how much they could be overstretched. You can also export this data to a .CSV to report on your team’s resourcing.
You can also enjoy visibility over the projects of which you’re a member by clicking the Filter button. Here, you can customize your Resourcing view by project, type, user, tags, labels, even roles within teams. By default, in Resourcing, all workspace members can see others’ capacity. Still, you can restrict who can see the Resourcing page via permissions in Settings.
You can even set your team members’ vacation time within Resourcing, so you know when they will be away and re-allocate actions accordingly if required. Enable the calendar in Workspace Settings and click ‘Customize calendar’ to add vacation time. Simply enter a name, the dates they’ll be away, and click ‘Add Holiday’.
To see Hive’s Resourcing app in action, watch our helpful video:
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