Leadership walkthrough · Chapter 5 of 8

Staffing, allocation and cost per hour

A project's team is more than a member list. Each person joins with a role on the project, an access level, the hours a week they give it, the dates, and what an hour of their time costs. From that, PMO Assist knows who is free, who is overbooked and what the team costs.

Add people to Card Checkout

1. Open the project, then Team, and choose Add people. The button sits in the project's header.
2. Pick someone. With time to allocate, the people with the most free time over the period are listed first, so Asha can see who is actually available.
3. Project role: what they do here, in words. Project manager, Backend developer, QA. It defaults to the person's designation.
4. Access: what they can do inside this project.
   • Lead runs the project: settings, members, sprints, everyone's time, reports. Give it to Ravi.
   • Member creates and updates work items and logs time. Give it to Meena, Karthik and Divya.
   • Viewer reads only.
5. Turn on Allocate time on this project, then set the time.
   • Time: hours a week, such as 24 h / week.
   • From and To. Leave To empty for Ongoing; an open-ended allocation always gets a review date.
6. Cost per hour: the hourly cost of this person's time on this project, and its currency. The dialog shows what that costs the project each week as you type.
7. Choose Add to project. If the hours fit the person's capacity, the allocation is booked at once.

Names, hours and rates are examples. A project uses one currency: it is fixed once the first allocation with a rate is saved, so the totals add up.

When a week would be overbooked

1. The allocation is saved as an exception. Until it is decided it counts as forecast only: nobody's capacity is quietly overcommitted.
2. The person's own manager decides. Meena reports to Ravi, so it lands in Ravi's queue under Portfolio›Exceptions. Ravi approves it, with an optional note, or rejects it.
3. Organisation policy can be stricter. An administrator may set overbooking to be refused outright. Then the button reads Not allowed by policy.

Approval follows the person, not the project: whoever manages Meena decides, whichever project asked. Only an overbooked week needs a decision. A tight week that still fits does not.

The Team page

Once people are added, Team answers "do we have the people we need?" A line at the top gives headcount, weekly hours and anything that needs attention. For each person it shows:

• the hours they give this project,
• how booked they are across all their projects, so an overstretched person shows here first,
• what they carry in the active sprint.

Select a person's time to open their allocation: change the hours, dates, role or cost per hour, or end it. The project's owner, or the account's Owner, can change someone's access or remove them. A lead can also ask AI for staffing advice on who should take sprint work nobody owns yet.

Team cost

For those who see rates, the Team page adds a Team cost panel: hours × cost per hour.

Below the figures, a monthly chart of planned against actual cost, and a row per person. If nobody has a cost per hour yet, the panel says so instead of showing zeros.

How an allocation moves

With people in place, the plan comes next: what ships, and when. Chapter 6.