Resource Allocation - Capacity Percent Max Explained

Overview of the Capacity Percent Max field in the User Profile in Project Insight. This field directly drives the overallocation alerts in PI but does not effect allocation reports.

Transcript:

Today, we are going to be talking about the capacity percent max field and Project Insight. This field can be found in the user settings screen, specifically under the Resource Info tab. It is the capacity percent max field. An important note before we begin: in order to use this field, you must first have the capacity and resource allocation add-on installed. In the configuration of that add-on, you'll need to have the option checked to individually edit capacity percent and capacity percent max on a per-user basis.

The capacity percent max field is a purely informational field. It's a threshold that sends an over-allocation alert when the percent is exceeded. It has no direct effect on resource allocation reports other than sending the alert. An individual user's capacity percent max, which in my case is 100%, takes precedence over the default capacity percent max field, which can be found on the resource allocation add-on configuration screen. As you can see, my capacity percent max default is 85%.

The main setting associated with the capacity percent max default field is this option to present an alert message when a project manager edits or adds a task that would over-allocate a resource. If I turn this off, there will be no option to add a default capacity max percent, as that alert will never trigger. Let's turn this on again, and we can see that there are several options under this main option. This option allows project managers or project schedulers to override an over-allocation alert and assign the hours to a resource, even though it goes over their capacity percent max.

These two settings below allow specifically project managers to override an allocation alert or resource managers to override an allocation alert. Navigating to an example resource allocation report, we can see that Project Insight's over-capacity hours look at capacity and not target utilization or percent allocation.

Now, going back to my resource info, we can see that capacity percent max can be set as a different value than capacity percent. In most cases, the capacity percent and capacity percent max match each other, as project managers would want the capacity percent alert to go out when they have reached capacity. However, for instance, if a project manager wanted to give a person a little bit of leeway and reach 95% capacity rather than 100% before the alert is shown, it would allow an extra 5% leeway on that resource.

Now, let's take a look at what the alert actually looks like. Navigating to the task list for a project, I created this cause and alert task, which takes 2,000 hours, well above my allotted capacity. I'll assign myself as a resource to it and click 'Save Task'. We can see that we've gotten a validation error: the task could not be saved due to the following scheduling errors, and it has not been saved because it was over-allocated.

Now, because I'm a project manager, I have the option to either select 'Okay' and allocate this task to a different user or override the allocation conflicts. So, we’ll click 'Override', and we can see that this task was assigned to me regardless of the alert because I manually overrode it.

For more information about the other percentage fields—percent allocation, default utilization percent, and capacity percent—you can refer to our other videos and documentation on the subject.