We recently purchased Daptiv and we're setting up our resource pool. While the majority of our IT staff do project work, we do have a Service Desk team that is 100% dedicated to providing front line, customer support. They do not work projects. How have others accounted for such resources in Daptiv (if at all)?

Also, how are others dealing with resources who have limited project availability, eg., functional managers, staff dedicated to infrastructure and maintenance activities? These resources are sometimes needed to provide guidance on project requests or do small amounts of project work, however, their availability is limited.

We've considered creating projects for these operational activities (ex. Service Desk, Management Activities) so we can report on how IT staff time is spent. BTW, we have our own time accounting system (moving to Daptiv's is planned for next year). We also have a Service Desk system, so I don't want to duplicate info or have double data entry.

What has worked for you?

We have a whole directorate within our central IT department that handles both project work and support or ongoing maintenance work at the same time.  To handle this in Daptiv, we set up the projects as regular projects and then have buckets of Support-type projects to which we allocate our staff for specific percentages of their time.  We actually piloted this during this past fiscal year and found that we needed to make an additional Support-type project to account for "management and administrative" time.  With the three separate project groups setup and our staff allocated, we can now get a pretty good idea of who's available for what and, because we are having folks report their time against these projects, we can validate or adjust the percentages that we had originally set for these resources.

Since you already have a time accounting system, you'll need to make sure that the projects and Support-type projects match with what you set up in Daptiv so you can do a cross-check between the two.  It will be easier when / if you move to time reporting in Daptiv.

Hope this helps!

Darlene

Great suggestion. I'm going to give this a try. Thanks!