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THE REQUESTOR/ALLOCATOR APPROACH 121

• Assignment Assistance: We don’t see too much of this, although it could be
most useful. This requires the use of a skills database. The idea is to define
the resource need by skill and to have the system suggest resources on the
basis of skill and availability.

• Top-down Assignment Planning: This is also a skills-based system. The idea
is to associate skills with the work when the work is first defined (may be a
planning template rather than an actual, approved project). Work may also
be defined at a high level (not detailed). When it is time to actually schedule
the work, the skills are replaced by actual named resources. This capability
is important to a project portfolio management system, so that prospective
and actual project demands can be analyzed. For such a system to work, re-
source demands must be able to be summarized by skill.

• Resource Leveling: Around for decades, this capability is deemed to be es-
sential during the software selection process, and then is totally ignored.
Reasons include reluctance to put the effort into defining assignments, and
unusable results due to weak resource leveling algorithms.

• A few alternate resource smoothing algorithms have been introduced. But
these, too, have failed to be accepted thus far. Several of these include some
type of “best-fit” approach (see Chapter 4.3).

Resource Analysis

Some of this topic has already been covered. It consists of being able to query
the various resource data to analyze resource loadings and demand, resource
performance, and so on. It requires access to the data from varied (including
remote) locations, with security to control who accesses the data and what data
is accessed. It requires that voluminous data be sliced and diced, suggesting
that an on-line analytical processing (OLAP) type of capability would be use-
ful. Resource and skills coding is needed to provide a hierarchical roll-up and
drill-down capability.

The Requestor/Allocator Approach

Occasionally, a vendor takes a different approach toward assigning resources to
work. For instance, ResourceView, developed by Artemis as part of their
ArtemisViews suite, has two components. In the Requestor module, anyone can
identify work to be done (projects or separate tasks), and add them to a list that
goes to owners of the resources. In the allocation module, the resource man-
agers assign resources to the tasks. Resources may also be requested by adding a