By assigning your employees to projects, you can show the planned effort required for the project and view both remaining capacity and overallocation. In Meisterplan, this is called "allocating".

• Importing Several Allocations at Once
• Individually Adding Allocations

Importing Several Allocations at Once

Allocating resources is especially easy when you have entered all your allocations in a spreadsheet. With the Quick Import, you can import new and updated allocations in only a few steps by using copy and paste:

Learn more in our Quick Import: Allocation List and Quick Import: Allocation Matrix articles.

Individually Adding Allocations

If you prefer to enter your allocations directly in Meisterplan, you can do that in the Portfolio Designer or the Project Details. This article will focus on the Portfolio Designer. For more information on the Project Details see the article Project Details View (Allocations Tab).

Resources

In the Portfolio Designer, click the plus icon next to a project name to schedule employees. You can search for employees by name, role or skill in the selection window.

Assign each employee a corresponding planned effort by entering it in the allocation segment below the project bar.

You can specify effort in various units. In addition to FTE ("Full Time Equivalent"), are the units d (day) and hours. When entering an effort value, simply type the first letter of the unit after the value (e.g. 1f for 1 FTE, 1d for 1 day or 1h for 1 hour). Meisterplan automatically converts all entries to the appropriate unit.

Roles

You can also plan roles on your projects instead of employees. This allows you to reserve capacity on a long-term basis - especially if you aren’t yet sure which employees will be working on the project.

If you need more than one employee of a certain role on your project, simply specify more FTE accordingly. For example, if you want to plan with the capacity of two senior developers, enter 2 FTE.

If a required role hasn’t been created in Meisterplan yet, you can create it in the Resource Pool under Roles. For more information, see the article Managing Roles.

For a more detailed effort planning for the project duration, you can right-click on an allocation segment to split it. This allows you to create any number of allocation segments and fill them individually.

In order to simplify the time segmentation, Meisterplan offers an optional Time Grid. To do this, select Time Grid under Allocation Mode in the toolbar.

In the Time Grid mode, the project bar is pre-segmented according to the selected Zoom Level. You can easily navigate through the segments using the tab and arrow keys while maintaining the planned effort.

For more information on working with allocations, see the article Adding and Editing Allocations.