Configure Columns in Resource Center: Projects Tab [Early Access]

Overview

The Resource Center offers a single, easy-to-use visual interface where you can manage allocations, scheduled hours, resource scheduling adjustments, Resource Requests, and more—all in one place. The new Configure Columns feature in the early access Projects tab extends this visibility even further, giving you the flexibility to:

• Expose data that was previously unavailable—like Future Scheduled Hours, Future Allocated Hours, EAC, or resource custom field columns
• Hide the information you don't need
• Resize each column individually or resize the entire column list
• Sort by specific columns
• Easily digest timeline information with small visual updates

All of the above can be leveraged in Saved Views to help you quickly complete common staffing processes. For example, you can curate Saved Views that allow you to more easily:

• Visualize workload capacity
• Manage utilization for your team
• Use the Resource Center as a bench report
• Submit Resource Requests
• Staff projects or approve outstanding Resource Requests
• Look at projects in a pipeline view

You can even leverage resource custom fields when building these views to help you get the information you need for these processes that may be more unique to your business practices.

To access this new functionality, select Resourcing in the left navigation to open the Resource Center, then select the Projects [Early Access] tab.

Benefits of Configurable Columns in Resourcing Views

When you take advantage of the functionality available in the early access Projects tab, you can:

• Make informed resourcing decisions with all the data in one centralized location
• Save time and reduce context switching without having to switch back and forth between different tabs and tools to find the information you need
• More efficiently expose where data is missing or incomplete
• See the impact of resourcing decisions in real-time with more relevant data visibility and timely updates
• Collaborate more effectively with your team by viewing the same data to make resourcing decisions
• Customize your resourcing experience with Saved Views, additional columns, resource custom fields available as columns, additional filters, and the ability to adjust not only how wide the list side of the Resource Center is but also individual column width and sorting.

As more columns become available to save in your views, you’ll be able to integrate more of your processes into the Resource Center—from utilizing bench reports to managing resources for pipeline projects to reducing staffing time with Resource Requests.

Differences between the Legacy Projects Tab and the Early Access Projects Tab

In addition to an updated look and a more flexible, customizable resourcing experience, the early access Projects tab gives you access to new tools and features that are not available in the legacy tab. To familiarize yourself with the new page and learn how to complete the actions you normally would, expand each section below where we compare differences between the new and old layout.

List Appearance

In the legacy tab, the Projects list was small—with no way to adjust the size—and contained static information that always appeared at the project, resource, and task level. The hours in each row were rounded to the nearest hour—due to space constraints. You could only see when Resource Requests were submitted, indicated by an Envelope (“   ”) icon. At the task level, you could view up to 100 tasks maximum and information was hidden based on filter criteria.

In the early access tab, you can:

• See the same information broken down into separate columns, making it easier to read.
  
• Clearly identify project rows with quick visual references like the Folder (“   ”) icon.
  
• Quickly identify resource rows with quick visual references like the differently styled Expand (“   ”) icon and a profile picture. For unnamed resources, the profile picture is replaced by an acronym of the account role.
  
• Choose to hide some information and show information that was not previously available—like Future Scheduled Hours, Future Allocated Hours, Request Status, EAC, or resource custom fields.
  
• View all Resource Request statuses in a dedicated column—even showing on named resources when they were staffed and approved via Resource Requests.
  
• Adjust the width of individual columns.
  
• Change how to sort information from any column.
  
• Adjust the width of the entire list.
  
• See the exact hours and minutes breakdown for all hour types in the respective columns.
  
• View up to 50 tasks maximum to load information quicker, with the option to load more rows in increments of 100 rows.
  
• View up to 50 resources maximum to load information quicker, with the option to load more rows in increments of 100 rows.
  

List Actions

Some of the actions that you can perform from the list are still the same. For example, all More (“   ”) menu options are the same in both tabs. Other actions may not be available currently or may appear in a different place.

In the legacy tab, you could expand all rows from the top of the list, add people and unnamed resources to projects, view other assignees on tasks, edit resource estimated hours on tasks, access Team Builder from the right side of the list, and show all or hide some of a resource’s assigned projects—with projects being automatically hidden when they had no future allocations or didn’t match filter criteria.

In the early access tab, you cannot expand all rows at once or edit any cells for the time being.

You can:

• Click the Add (“   ”) icon in the team member row to add a user to a project.
  
• See that unnamed resources appear first in projects and all named resources appear by default in order of the number of future allocated hours—or future scheduled hours if you have Scheduled Hours selected as your Hours View Preference in display preferences—instead of being hidden. This default sort behavior can be changed and updated in your Saved Views.
  
• Access Team Builder from the Resources column, which is visible by default, but can be hidden, if desired.
  
• Make your views more customizable by adding custom field columns and removing the columns you don't need to see.
  
• Click Show More to load more resource or task rows in increments of 100 until all rows meeting the filtered criteria are visible, then click Show Less to return to the default 50 tasks or resources shown.
  
• Open the Task side panel to view other assignees and edit resource estimated hours without leaving the context of the Resource Center.
  

Side Panels

In the legacy tab, you clicked the resource name to open the Resource side panel. In the project row, you clicked the Side Panel (“   ”) icon to open the Project side panel.

When you clicked the task name in the task row, a new tab opened with the Task side panel open in Task Tracker. When you clicked the project name in the project row, a new tab would open with the project’s Resourcing tab.

In the early access Projects tab, the following side panels are currently accessible:

• Resource side panel—In the project row, click the Side Panel (“   ”) icon for named and unnamed resources.
  

• Project side panel—In the project row, click the project name in the Project column. You can still access the project by clicking the Go to Project link in the Project side panel header.
  
• Task side panel—In the task row, click the Side Panel (“   ”) icon to view and update task information.
  

Similar to the legacy tab, you can only open side panels when you have the appropriate access.

Saved Views

The behavior for Saved Views is the same in the new tab as the legacy tab. In fact, all views that you have created and saved in the legacy Projects tab will be available in the early access tab.

In addition to saving filter selections and the columns that appear (including the order of columns), each individual view in the Resource Center now also includes:

• Individual column width sizes, as well as the width of the entire list side.
• Column sorting selections for resource, project, and task rows.
• User and resource custom fields that can be added as columns in your views.

Timeline Appearance

In the legacy tab, allocations and scheduled hours appeared differently depending on your selected hours view preference:

• Allocated Hours—Allocation bars in the resource row were blue and overallocations were purple with red shading appearing above and below the allocation bar. All allocations in the project row were blue or—if project colors were enabled—matched the project color. If scheduled hours were entered, a thin, blue line appeared at the bottom of the allocation bar in both the resource row and the project row.
• Scheduled Hours—Scheduled hour boxes in the resource row were blue and overscheduled hours were red. All scheduled hours in the project rows were not shaded any color.
• Compare Scheduled vs. Allocated—The height of each resource and project row was increased to include visual information on both scheduled hours and allocations. These hours appeared the same as in their respective views with two exceptions: overscheduled hours were represented by a thin, red line over allocations and the scheduled hours boxes did not have any blue or red color.

In all of these hour views, scheduled time off is indicated in the resource row with a triangle in the upper-left corner of the date range and holiday information does not appear. If the time off is equal to their full working day or there is a holiday, these days contain diagonal striping on the project rows to indicate it is a non-working day.

In the Allocated Hours view preference of the early access tab, you’ll notice:

• Allocation bars on the resource row are now a purple color, with lighter or darker shading based on the number of hours. Soft allocations are still indicated by diagonal stripes.
  
• Overallocations now display as dark red bars, helping you quickly identify when a user is over capacity.
  
• A light gray overlay on all allocation bars makes the percentage and hours information easy to read.

In the Scheduled Hours view preference of the early access tab, you’ll notice:

• Scheduled hours bars are purple—with lighter or darker shading based on the number of hours—and a purple line at the top of the bar.
  
• Overscheduled hours bars are red with a dark red line at the top of the bar.
  
• A light gray overlay on scheduled hours bars makes the hours information easy to read.

In the Compare Scheduled vs. Allocated view preference of the early access tab, you’ll notice:

• The height of the row now stays the same with the scheduled hours and allocations information shrinking to fit in that space. These hours otherwise appear the same as in their respective views.
  

Available Columns

While the Resource Center will have a new look and feel, you’ll still have access to all the same information, as well as additional information. By default, these columns will all appear in the same order you see them in now. The main difference is that you now have the power to hide unnecessary information and rearrange columns in the order that makes sense for your team and your processes.

You can also sort your resources based on the different data points that are important for your current process—such as sorting by Request Status to quickly see which requests have been rejected for unnamed resources or sorting by Scheduled Hours to start entering hours for unscheduled resources.

On the right side of the columns, you’ll notice a dedicated column that contains the following:

• Configure Columns (“   ”) icon—Located at the top of the column, this button launches the Configure Columns modal, which allows you to adjust which columns appear in the list for the Resource, Project, and Task rows.
• Add (“   ”) icon—Located in the Resource rows, this icon allows you to add named and unnamed resources to projects.
• Side Panel (“   ”) icon—When located in the Resource row, this icon opens the User side panel. When located in the Projects row, this icon opens the Resource side panel.
  Note: You can also access the Project side panel by clicking the name of projects that you have permission to access.
• More (“   ”) menu—Located in the Projects and Tasks rows, these menus allow you to perform actions at the project and task levels.

You’ll notice that different information is available in the different row levels. See each section for information on each default column that appears in the Project, Resource, and Task rows, as well as information on custom field columns. For information on how to hide, show, and rearrange columns, see Configuring Columns in Resource Center [Early Access].

Project Rows

The top-level row contains information about projects the team member is participating in.

The following columns are available for the Project row:

Resource Rows

The second-level row contains information about named and unnamed resources within projects. Depending on what type of resource appears in these rows, you will see different data in the columns.

The following columns are available for the Resource row:

Task Rows

The third-level row contains information about tasks the team member is assigned to within a project.

The following columns are available for the Task row:

Custom Field Columns

To give you more visibility into your named and unnamed resource data, you can add resource custom field columns to your Resource Center views. Using custom fields allows you to add any business-specific fields to your views that aid you in your staffing processes—all of which ultimately helps you ensure that you can view and maintain all of your resource data in one place.

Being able to quickly reference and update resource data can help you make more informed resourcing decisions, keep your teams aligned, and improve your project outcomes by identifying and updating data gaps or inaccuracies much earlier.

Resource custom field sets are currently available to add. Visible on the second-level row (Project), resource custom fields are user custom fields that have been marked as Available to Resources in account settings. These fields show data for both named and unnamed resources based on the custom field data in the Resource side panel.

Like the other columns available in the Resource Center, you can also sort and resize custom field columns. The only columns that cannot be sorted are multi-select Choice custom fields.

To quickly switch processes and see different custom fields, you can set up Saved Views in the Resource Center.