Allow indirect resource workstream allocation

[rmichela]

It would save a ton of clicks when doing "what if" exploration if you could assign resources to workstreams instead of directly to tasks.

• Allow resources to be assigned to one or more workstreams
• If a task has no explicitly assigned resources, and has a workstream assigned, pick from any resource assigned to that workstream

This would make it way easier to experiment with mixing up different combinations of resources without having to manually click on a ton of tasks to add another available resource for scheduling.

[countincognito]

I think I can see what you are suggesting here. It sounds like what you are trying to achieve is similar to the way non-explicit target resources work. Unfortunately, the mechanism you suggest goes against some of the key paradigms in the application.

To clarify: in Project Plan resources are not assigned to activities, but the other way round (i.e. activities are assigned to resources). The difference is subtle but important. Similarly, work streams are simply labels for categorizing activities and are not used in the management of activities or resources. The only special case is when a work stream is marked as a phase, in which case they can be used to calculate the length of engagement for an indirect resource. But, even in that case, they are not used in the management or allocation of activities and resources. There is more detail available in the documentation (https://github.com/countincognito/Zametek.ProjectPlan/wiki).

Perhaps it would be simpler to have a way of editing multiple activities at once to set the list of target resources. Or you could just add extra resources to the configuration settings, assign them as activity targets and disable them individually to remove them from the calculation. How does that sound?

[rmichela]

We are thinking the same thing. I just did a bad job of articulating it. Turning off Explicit Resource works, but it's very course grained.

What I'm thinking is something more like adding skill tags to resources. Any resource can have any number of skills. i.e. Services, Databases, UI, CI/CD. There could then be a "Required Skills" column for each task from which you could select one or more required skills. Any resource tagged with the needed skills could could then be assigned the task.

Such model would allow decoupling tasks from resources, making it much easier to compute project plans for various combinations of resources without having to edit the task list, or its associated task skill requirements.

[countincognito]

Nice idea. I will have to think about how this could be implemented.