Staff Availability Report

Edition: All Editions 

Plan: Pro & Enterprise 

The Staff Availability report shows you how busy, or not, your people are in the near future. The primary use of the report is to help you identify users that have availability to be allocated to a project that you’re looking to resource, but there are a number of secondary uses. 

The report can be found in a number of places: 

• Reports > Standard Reports > Resourcing > Staff Availability 
• Resourcing > Resourcing Reports > Core Reports > Staff Availability 
• From within a project’s Resource Schedule, click “More Stuff” > Staff Availability 

Orientation of Report 

Filters — When you first enter the report you will be promoted to apply filters and press “Run” (TIP: If you press “Run” without applying filters, it will run the report in full). Filters enable you to refine the list of returned users e.g. if you want to ensure you’re looking to allocate employees to projects before you turn to contractors, you can use the “Employee Status” filter and set it to return anyone that’s an “Employee”. 

Views — You can toggle the timeframe you look at (e.g. in Days or Weeks) and how you view availability (e.g. in Days/Hours of availability or in Percentages). Please note if you have a preference (e.g. as a company we prefer to think in “Weeks” and “Percentage”, we can configure this to be your default setting every time you run the report. Please contact the Support Team if this would be useful). 

Grouping of rows — The report groups users by their office (if you have a multi-entity set-up) and then by their default role. Within the default role groupings, the report then orders the users alphabetically by last name 

Availability Conditional Formatting 

The Staff Availability report uses conditional formatting to draw your attention to employees who are available to be resourced to projects in the required time period. 

The conditional formatting works as so: 

Green = the user has >75% availability 

Amber = the user has between 20—75% availability 

Grey = the user has between 0—20% availability 

Red = the user has <0% availability (in other words, they are “over allocated”) 

Identifying Part-Time Users 

Part-time users are identified by an amber triangle in the cell containing their name. 

NOTE: In the image above, Jane Doe is identified as a part-time user. Note that Jane Doe works the equivalent of a 3-day week. In Jane’s instance, since all 3-days are available in every subsequent week after the starting week, Jane Doe displays in green because they personally have 100% availability. 

Expanding Users (Taking a Deeper Look) 

Clicking a users name expands their availability strip to reveal the component parts. 

In the example above we can see that Rashmina Begum is over allocated by 1 day in the week of 29th March and a further 1 day in the week of 5th April. 

Clicking their name reveals their breakdown of availability, like so… 

You are provided with rows for: 

• Project(s) they are resourced to, including their allocations 
• Internal Codes they are resourced to, including their allocations 
• Time Off they have, including the number of days 

NOTE: You can click the “Expand All” link located near the top-left of the report to open every user’s full availability breakdown in one action. 

Please note that the project(s) and internal codes are hyperlinks. Clicking a hyperlink will navigate you to the relevant page to take action. 

Placeholders 

Placeholders are generic users you can resource to in a project’s Resource Schedule. The typical use case is that you know a certain type of role is going to be required, when it’s going to be required, and for how long. However, the only uncertainty is who that user will be. 

In this scenario, we strongly recommend you resource to a placeholder, for the following reasons: 

1. If you leave the Resource Schedule empty, the Future Schedule is under-reported and your ability to track how close you are to hitting the Project Budget is negated 
   

1. It ensures you factor in required but as yet unidentified resourcing requirements into the view of Staff Availability 
   
    
   In the image above, we can see that we have a requirement for a Partner for 5 days in the starting week, and then 3 days per week for the subsequent 5 weeks. Thankfully, we can see that Piotr Kuzniak has 5 days of availability in the starting week, and Jane Doe has 3 days of availability to cover the subsequent weeks. Whilst some shuffling around may be required, we can at least see at an overall level our capacity and demand are equal. 
    
   If we hadn’t used a placeholder, our view would have been: 
   
    
    
   With this view, it would have been likely that suboptimal decisions were made, up to and including looking to win projects that we don’t have the capacity to deliver. 

Another key benefit of placeholders is that it’s very straightforward to transfer the allocation to a user. In a project’s Resource Schedule, you can use the “Switch to Someone Else” feature to make the change in just a couple of clicks. 

Resourcing to Internal Codes 

Resourcing to an internal code enables you to keep the Staff Availability report accurate and up-to-date. This is best demonstrated with a use case. 

Scenario:  Jane Doe will attend a 1-day training course in the week of 26th April. This means that they will have 2 rather than 3 days of availability that week. 

Clicking the “Internal Code” hyperlink takes you to the “Resource to Internal Codes” page. 

Within the page, click the green “+” icon to bring up a list of internal codes, browse, select and click “Save”. Once an internal code has been added, a corresponding row appears in the page and you now have the ability to enter the relevant data. In this example, 1 day in the week of 26th April. 

Once entered, the Staff Availability report is updated, like so: 

NOTE: The week of 26th April now appears amber. 

And clicking on Jane Doe’s name to expand their availability breakdown results in: