Features Below Available To: ✅ Grow Plan ❌ Track Plan ❌ Free Plan
May 2024 - Watch the video above to learn about recent changes to Staffing feature
Questions on how Staffing Availability + Staffing Current Week work together
Will the Current Week adjustments filter into the Availability view?
Yes, behind the scenes the hours are the same - these are just two different views of the same information.
We mainly make edits in the Current Week view. Is there a "rebalance" button in the Current Week view?
No, there isn't a rebalance button in the Current Week view. You shouldn’t use the Current Week view for this; we suggest making your edits in the Availability view.
Staffing Availability adjustments will make changes to the Current Week view, but, will changes made to Current Week view also change the Staffing Availability view?
Yes.
Questions on how Staffing Availability + Project Planner work together
Is the Staffing Availability view only useful if it is a project that is fixed fee or does hourly work too?
Staffing helps you plan how your employees spend their time. It is more useful if you have set budgets for that time, regardless of fixed fee or hourly.
In order for Staffing Availability to work - do you need to enter each staff member's hours per phase per project?
You can keep entering hours in manually to plan your staff time. However, you will be losing out on other benefits. Many of Monograph’s tools and reports use the hours you assign to staff members as the target budget. We recommend you always enter these in the planner.
How do we add a new employee into projects without adding them to each phase, for each project?
You need to add anyone that is assigned to a project into Planner, when you add someone you can select "add to all phases". Alternatively, you can assign a team member to a phase directly within Staffing Availability.
Will the planning automatically fill in based on the project plan given the removal of the populate button?
When you first assign hours to a phase, the staffed hours will automatically be calculated and populated in Staffing as long as the "Done" button is clicked once you're finished in the project planner. This is why we always recommend adding your hours to the project planner.
If you make a phase longer (say you add a month to the timeline), but leave the fee amount the same, does Staffing Availability redistribute the fee to the extended phase, or does that require a hit of the rebalance button?
In this case, the extra weeks of the timeline will have zero hours populated, but you can use the rebalance button to recalculate them if you wish.
Is there a way to rebalance across the board? I'm in Staffing Availability and hours are not getting updated - I have had to rebalance after adjusting the project hours.
Yes! You can rebalance for all team members in all projects/phases - this is based on who is included when using the filters. Click here to learn more.
Why don't certain projects or phases appear as an option in Staffing?
In order to allocate hours to a phase, the phase must be both active and current. This means that phases that have ended or have not yet started will not appear as an option to add hours in Staffing Availability or Staffing Current View. If the phase should have hours allocated in Staffing, the phase's date range in the Project Planner will need to be adjusted.
Questions around Staffing for Internal Projects
What is an internal project?
This would be any work that you do on a repeating basis but is not billable to a client because it's work that you are doing for your firm. All firms have some level of general office work. Some examples are: weekly staffing meeting, trainings, 1:1 meetings, annual reviews, materials library maintenance, applying for awards, marketing work, etc.
In staffing, how do you assign general office work? We do a weekly office meeting that is required for all to attend and takes an hour.
The best way to track and allocate this time, is to create an internal project - you can create one or as many as you'd like for different studio teams.
In this case, you can create a project that is called "0000 - Internal Meetings", add a single custom phase called "Staff Meeting" and add every employee to it. There is no need to allocate time to it here. When you run your Monthly Staffing, you can then allocate 4 hours for the month to this. This will appear on your employees timesheet as well to easy logging.
Questions around Staffing + Proposed Projects
For Staffing or future forecasting, is there the ability to show different status for projects in the planning (ie. Proposed, Active, Paused etc) so that we can get a better idea for future forecasting? i.e We "pause" future phases so employees don't add time to them, but now they don't show up in the forecast, same for proposed phases.
We show proposed projects help you view their impact on your plans. Paused projects are not included as it is unclear when they will resume and therefore when the hours will be used.
How do proposed projects play into Staffing? Can you exclude those to avoid seeing their impact
Proposed projects' staffing hours will factor into your Staffing plans always. We are planning to add a filter to exclude these in a future enhancement.
Is there a way to have phases with a non-specific start and end date omitted from the project planner? For example, we have an additional services phase that is charged hourly as needed through the project, currently we just set it from 1 day, but now with not being able to add hours outside of the planned time this will be an issue.
You’ll need to update the timeline for this to work at the moment.
Questions on how Staffing + Timesheets sync
Do Staffing Availability and Current Week projects and phases connect to the Timesheets?
Yes, projects and hours that are assigned to your team members will appear on their timesheet. Timesheets will only populate automatically for projects/phases that have hours allocated to the team member.
Questions on Staffing Permissions
We do not want all our Project Managers to have admin access. We want to limit their access to adjusting project schedules, staffing and seeing generic percentages. We do not want them to see the actual numbers of our fees. Is it possible to edit permissions so the finances are separate from the project management planning?
At the moment this is not possible with our permissions. We believe that anyone with edit permission on a project should be fully aware of the billable rates and budget that they are working towards in order to be able to make good decisions.