Overview
The most significant difference between the Functional Roles vs. Resource Pool is assignment of university employees to each. Employees are assigned to a single Resource Pool, whereas, they may be assigned to multiple functional Roles.
In this article:
Functional Roles
Functional Roles define the primary and secondary job duties that a individual performs. After defining a set of Functional Roles, individuals will need to be assigned these values as this will help project managers assign people to projects based on their capabilities.
It is understood that employees "wear multiple hats"; therefore an individual can have multiple Functional Roles. It is best to define which of the Functional Roles is the individual's Primary Role. A Primary Functional Role is what is used when calculating the person's availability when sorting by Functional Role in Resource Management. By default each individual has the Functional Role of Participant, when other Functional Roles are added this can be modified.
When evaluating project requests (potential work that organization or institution is going to undertake), Functional Roles can be added to the request so that work effort can be estimated and capacity planning reviewed. During project request evaluation, the actual resource that will be assigned to a potential project is often unknown. However, after evaluating the scope of the project, project request evaluators can typically identify the roles needed to complete the project. Once a project request is approved, a staffing exercise will be performed and the Functional Roles that were previously added to the project request will be replaced by users having that specific primary or secondary functional role.
The Enterprise Service Management system offers the feature to track Project costs by assigning cost rates and standard rates to each Functional Role. Determining if this feature is utilized is the responsibility of the department/organization when submitting a request to create/update functional role(s).
Resource Pools
Resource Pools are typically classified by the Resource Management area responsible for assigning resources to projects. A Resource Pool is assigned a manager as this is the person that typically has control over the resources/users belonging the pool and to approve any staffing requests made for their individuals.
In addition to making staffing decisions by Resource Pool, the Resource Pool value is available as a filter on many reports within Enterprise Service Management. This will enable reporting by the Resource Pool so that, for example, leadership can see where specific pools are currently deployed.
Important
An individual can only belong to a single Resource Pool.
Resource pools are typically automatically created when a department is on boarded into the ESM Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) system and tend to match the ESM groups created to align with the department's functional areas of responsibility which typically mirrors their organizational chart.
Need additional help or have issues
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