This article is to provide all details about resource aggregates, it will cover the following points:
1. What are Resource Aggregates?
2. Resource aggregate categories
3. Ways to update capacity and availability
4. Data visualisation and fetching logic for ‘Resource Reports’, ‘Resource Finder’ and ‘PA Reports’
5. Troubleshooting and Resource diagnostics
6. Enhancements made in ‘Quebec’ release related to aggregates
What are Resource Aggregates?
Resource Aggregates are tables in which user’s capacity, availability, actual and allocated hours are stored.
Resource Aggregates are stored in weekly and monthly levels in ‘resource_aggregate_weekly’ and ‘resource_aggregate_monthly’ tables respectively.
Resource Aggregate Categories:
Resource Aggregate tables store 4 types of data i.e., Capacity, Allocated, Availability, Actual.
Allocated category is further classified into Project Confirmed, Project Allocated and Non-Project Time, and Actual category is classified into Project Actual and Non-Project Actual, based on the task for which the aggregates are generated.
Capacity: To get detailed information on capacity, refer to this article.
Allocated:
Allocated category records are generated when a user is soft/hard booked for a particular duration of time.
Allocated category is classified into Project Confirmed, Project Allocated and Non-Project Time based on the task for which the aggregates are generated.
Project Confirmed:
These aggregates are generated when a resource plan is moved to the confirmed state. Resources are soft booked by confirming the resource plan and an entry is created under ‘project_confirmed’ category in all aggregate tables i.e ‘resource_aggregate_weekly’ and ‘resource_aggregate_monthly’.
Project Allocated:
Resources are hard booked by allocating the resource plan and an entry is created under ‘project_allocated’ category in all aggregate tables i.e ‘resource_aggregate_weekly’ and ‘resource_aggregate_monthly’.
On creating an entry in this category will result in the removal of ‘project_confirmed’ record. This is because the resource plan is no more in confirmed state, it is now moved to the allocated state.
NOTE: The Project Confirmed and Project Allocated records are generated only when a resource plan is confirmed or allocated for a project, project task, story, or a project type demand.
Non-project Time: These records are generated when a resource plan is confirmed/allocated for tasks other than the ones listed above, or when an operational resource plan is allocated.
for Example: If a user is booked for 25 percent capacity for training by allocating an Operational Resource Plan and 50 hours are allocated for the project, then Non-Project Time records are generated for the Operational Plan and Project Allocated Records are generated for Project Work.
The time card users can record the time worked on a task/operational work using time cards.
When the time card is approved, the hours from the time card entry and the hourly resource rate are used to update the Actual hours and Actual cost values of the associated resource plan and actual aggregates are generated.
Actual category is classified into Project Actual and Non-Project Actual, based on the task for which the aggregates are generated.
Project Actual, Non-Project Actual:
The project Actual records are generated when time card task is a project, project task, story, or a project type demand.
When the time card task is different from those listed above, or when a category other than 'task' and 'project/project task' is generated, the Non-Project actual records are generated.
Availability: It is the value that a Resource Manager considers while allocating resources to tasks.
Availability = Capacity – (Confirmed + Allocated)
Suppose an operational resource plan is created for a 5-hour meeting and is allocated for a week i.e from 2020-12-27 to 2021-01-02 then availability for user with ‘Resource Management Schedule’ schedule is calculated as follows:
Availability = Capacity (40) – (Confirmed (0) + Allocated (5))
Availability for week i.e from 2020-12-27 to 2021-01-02 is 35 hours.
If a user is assigned more than his scheduled hours, then availability will be negative.
On the Resource Allocation workbench, Filter icon on the Resource Finder can be used to filter the resources by available, over-allocated, or all resources (available from ‘Paris’ release onwards).
Ways to update Capacity and Availability:
1.The ’Update Resource Capacity’ UI action on user or group record will generate or update the capacity and availability data in all resource aggregate tables.
2.Administrator can also automate the ’Update resource capacity’ scheduled job to generate records in regular intervals.
3.The ’Update Resource Aggregates’ UI action on user or group record will generate or update all aggregates in all resource aggregate tables. In addition to generating or updating capacity and availability, it synchronises aggregates with Resource Allocation Daily Entries.
4.The ’CapacityGenerationAPI’ script include can be run to generate or update records of capacity and availability. It can generate records for All Active PPS Resource Users, Array of (Users, groups, Roles, Schedules), User Json Array.
NOTE: If any records for resource plan duration is missing, creating a resource plan will generate capacity and availability data. However, until the release of ‘Quebec’, it is always recommended to generate capacity and availability records before creating resource plan using one of the above 4 approaches.
Where can we look for resource aggregates?
PA Reports: In PA reports, various types of reports are available to provide all types of aggregate information at weekly and monthly levels.
Resource Finder:
You can view and manage resource aggregates using Resource Finder where you can find resource availability, resource capacity, %utilisation, confirmed, allocated and actual hours of a resource.
Resource Reports: Resource Requesters and Resource Managers can generate ‘Allocation’ or ‘Allocation Details’ type of reports to collect information about capacity, availability, requested, confirmed, allocated and actual hours.
Fetching logic for ‘PA Reports’, ‘Resource Finder’, ‘Resource Reports’:
‘PA Reports’ and ‘Resource Finder’ fetch all aggregates data from the ‘Resource Aggregate Weekly’ and ‘Resource Aggregate Monthly’ tables based on the view chosen.
‘Resource Reports’ fetches capacity from the schedule, confirmed and allocated hours from Resource Allocation Daily entries. Availability is calculated on the fly using formula (Availability = Capacity – (confirmed + allocated)).
‘Resource Aggregate Weekly' and 'Resource Aggregate Monthly' data is not used in ‘Resource Reports’ because the start date and end date can be chosen from mid-week/mid-month.
Troubleshooting and Resource Diagnostics: Refer to this article for detailed information on troubleshooting and resource diagnostics.
Enhancements made in ‘Quebec’ release related to Aggregates:
|
Topic |
Prior Quebec |
Starting Quebec |
|
Resource Aggregate Daily |
Resource Aggregate Daily values are generated on every resource management operation. |
Resource Aggregate Daily values are no longer generated.
|
|
Daily data visualisation |
Daily data is fetched from ‘resource_aggregate_daily’ table. Resource Reports and Resource Finder drill-downs show daily capacity and availability from ‘resource_aggregate_daily’ table. |
Daily data is fetched from schedule and Resource Allocation Daily entries. Resource Availability and Resource Capacity Grids are added to view ‘Resource Aggregate Daily’ drill-downs in Resource Reports and Resource Finder. |
|
Resource plan creation |
Before creating the resource plan, user capacity generation is recommended.
|
For creating the resource plan, user capacity generation is not necessary.
|
|
‘Update FTE and Person Days in Resource Aggregates’ job |
No support for FTE values in resource aggregate tables i.e. ‘resource_aggregate_daily’ ‘resource_aggregate_weekly’ ‘resource_aggregate_monthly’ |
Provided a new Scheduled job to populate the FTE value in the Resource Aggregate Weekly and Monthly tables.
NOTE: This scheduled job can be used to update Person Days values on aggregate tables when 'Average Daily FTE Hours' value on user or group is changed.
|
|
Duplicate Records |
In certain cases, there were duplicate records generated in the aggregate tables. |
No further generation of duplicate capacity and availability records. |
How do I generate Daily Aggregates from ‘Quebec’ release on wards?
Wherever daily data is required Out of the box, it is taken care to get the daily data from schedule.
If Daily aggregates are required for any custom logic, Please use one of below approaches
’Generate resource aggregate dailies’ (scheduled job) - This new scheduled job can be automated to generate all daily aggregate records in a predefined interval(May be once in a day or week). It is recommended to use this approach than the one explained below.
Generate daily aggregates in real time for each operation in resource management - Create property 'com.snc.resource_management.generate_daily_aggregates' and set its value to true.
If ‘CapacityGenerationAPI’ script include is being used to generate the aggregates, parameter ‘generateDailyAggregates’ must be set to true to generate daily aggregates. By default, the parameter value is empty, which generates only weekly and monthly aggregates.
Thank you for this helpful article! I had a follow up question related to operational plan data in custom reports. I am trying to build a multi-level pivot table to show detailed allocations and actuals by user and task. I used the resource aggregate monthly table and have included allocated and actual categories in the filter. I have the report formatted how I want, but there are rows with "(empty)" for task #, type, and short description fields which I'm assuming are the operational plans we have allocated users to. How do I include the short description of the operational plan in my report?
Filters in use:
Report:
Hi @abhinaykumar , I created & allocated a resource plan for a Demand and the resource plan has plan type=task. However, in the "Resource Aggregate Monthly" table, the resource plan is categorized under category=non-project time. I expected that the resource plan will be categorized under category=project allocated since the resource plan is already allocated. Could you please let me know why this happened? Thank you.
Can you also display the resource plan number with the results? This currently is not an option when we use 'Update Personalized List'.
