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As you plan your projects in Meisterplan, you have several options for allocating work: individual resources, teams, or roles. This article will help you understand when and how to use teams and roles to optimally map your processes.
Understanding Roles and Teams
Teams are useful for mapping groups of people who need to be allocated to one or more projects together. Teams can be cross-functional and include members with different skills and roles.
Roles are ideal for representing the primary function or task of a person, e.g., "developer" or "project manager" in order to map requirements. They are useful for estimating capacity demand and planning.
When Should You Use Teams
- Agile Project Management: Teams are ideal for agile environments where work is assigned to cross-functional groups rather than individuals.
- Hybrid Project Management: In this case, you can allocate a mix of teams and individual resources to projects, such as when a specialist provides full or partial support to a team.
When Should You Use Roles
- Early Planning Phase: Use roles in the initial stages of planning a project when you do not know yet which specific people or teams will be available.
- Resource Request Process: As a project manager, you can use roles as a basis for requesting resources or teams with specific capacity and skills. Resource managers can then easily staff the roles with the right people or teams.
Differences Between Teams and Roles
| Team | Role | |
| Capacity Calculation |
A team's capacity is the sum of the resource capacities assigned to the team. For each resource, you can determine how much of their capacity is reserved for the team. This capacity is the subtracted from the individual resource. |
A role's capacity is the sum of all capacities of resources and teams with that role, plus any additional role capacity entered for the role. |
| Request Process |
You can use a team for staffing a role allocation. |
Role allocations can be transferred to resources or teams. |
| Skills | You can assign different skills to a team. |
Roles do not have skills. |
| Licensing |
Teams do not affect your licensing package. |
The licensing package is not affected by the role itself but by additional role capacities entered for roles. Learn more in the article Role Capacity Changes. |
Best Practices
Resource Request Process
To visualize a standard resource request process in Meisterplan, we recommend assigning roles to projects while you are in planning phase. This will give you an overview of the capacities and tasks required for the project. When the project is close to implementation, the project manager sends a request to the resource managers (e.g., using an allocation comment) to replace the roles with resources or teams. The best way to do this is the Staff Role function where you can transfer all or part of the role allocation to resources or teams. Role allocations that were not transferred will remain on the role and can staffed at at later date.
If a resource or team becomes unavailable, you can also unstaff their allocation or part of it back to the role. This helps you maintain a good overview of the original capacity requirements.
Using Primary Roles for Teams
It can be a good idea to define a primary role for each team, even if you work with cross-functional teams. Primary roles make it easier for you to staff roles in the request process and easily unstaff team allocations back to the role if there are changes to the plan.
In larger organizations with a hybrid approach it can be helpful to set up primary roles specifically for teams. This helps you staff roles faster, as well as enter the appropriate cost and billing rate per hour. Depending on your processes, you might use the same roles for individual resources and teams but add a "Team" to the name of the role (such as "Software Development Team"). Or you can create a specific role for each team and use this to visualize a demand process.
If you prefer not to add primary roles to teams, you can still use the Staff Role function. You simply need to remove the primary role filter to see all teams in addition to the resources:
Assigning Resources to Teams
For a team to have a plannable capacity, you need to assign team members. We recommend assigning a resource to a team with no more than 80% of their capacity to account for administrative and run the business activities.
If a resource is assigned to a team with 70% of their capacity, the resource has only 30% left for individual assignments, even if their team is not allocated to any project. That means that the resource will be displayed as overallocated if you assign them to a project with 40% capacity, even if the team has no allocations and there is, in fact, enough capacity.
If a resource is meant to be allocated to projects both individually and within their team, this should be taken into account when defining their team capacity. You can also change the resource's team capacity temporarily if they need to work on a large project so that they are not displayed as overallocated.