Working with Resource Management

John has now finished scheduling the project and its tasks. In the next step, he starts setting up the project team. He has to define the different roles that are participating in the project and carry out or supervise the staffing later on.

SAP Portfolio and Project Management offers a resource module to manage your internal resources. You can define candidates and resource managers, evaluate possible project team candidates based on their availability, location and qualifications, and make soft and hard assignments based on these comparisons.

To plan resources for a project in Project Management, you must first define project roles, such as project management, developers, consultants, or testers.

Note

Choose the element below to learn more about it:

Resources are technically depicted as business partners in Project Management; so both internal employees and external partners can be used to staff roles. In Project Management there are several possibilities for staffing roles; you can, for example, structure the staffing of roles into several smaller steps, which means that you can create a list of possible candidates or reserve resources before the actual staffing.

Note

Look at the following demonstration to learn how to maintain roles in the project and how to staff roles with resources directly in the project:

DemoWatch Demo

The resources that you can use for the staffing of roles in Project Management projects and, therefore, for resource planning are depicted technically as business partners in SAP Portfolio and Project Management.

A business partner can represent the following types of resources:

• An external resource:

  For example: an external consultant or a developer who supports in the execution of IT projects

• An internal resource:

  For example: an employee of your own company

A business partner can include general information, such as its name and address data, as well as information about the availability, location, or qualifications of the resource it represents.

Using Resource Pools, you are able to group different business partners/resources for staffing purposes. An example of a resource pool could be all of the employees of a certain location or your team of developers.