Assigning placeholder employees in your template can help you reduce the level of work entailed in creating a new project. This does mean that you will need to reassign the task to a live employee at some point. How we will execute this reassignment. Open the Traffic – Staff Schedule view (Menu/Projects/Traffic/Staff Schedules). Remember you can add this option to your jiggy bar. The left side of the menu gives you filtering options to make it easier to access the data relevant to what you are trying to accomplish. This will help you isolate the various departments, people, services, etc. to determine who has available workload to transfer the assignment to. NOTE: Remember that the placeholder staff cannot have login data or you will be charged for their account. But do keep them Active. These placeholder employees can also be assigned to a Department, which is a filter of the Traffic screen. So, back to the Staff Scheduling view. You need to choose how you want to filter your employees, projects, etc. so that you have a meaningful way to view your allocated time, so that it will be easier to reassign that time. The key is to view the resource availability over a given amount of time — this can be accessed at the top-left of your screen by clicking on the given time ranges or manually inputing the date range. Once you have pulled up the relevant data range, select your place holder employee and you will see all of the projects they are assigned to. Click the checkbox for all tasks that you wish to reassign to a true employee, and click the icon on your left. A drop-down menu will then allow you to select which employee(s) you want to reassign the task to. You will also have the option to send a notification via email of their assignment. Remember that there is a filter to display Active, Inactive, or All projects. This accounts for projects that are setup but have not gone live. This may or may not be a filter you choose to utilize (you may wish to only view Active projects). In the current view you are looking at tasks assigned over a date range. However, you can click on the hour allocation for a particular day to view which tasks are assigned for that day. Originally, this module did not account for the Calendar, and any appointments, vacations, etc. that could effect scheduling or workload. Now, when you add a meeting/calendar event to you calendar by default will be accounted for in your Traffic Schedule view, by using the option for “Block out on Schedule”. Uncheck this option in a Calendar Event if you do not want this event to effect your scheduling.
Back to the Schedule and Task screen. There are new options that will be added to the Details section for any given highlighted task. When you click on People, you can view the Employees assigned to the task. Now the Traffic Scheduling view will be a part of this view. Another view to consider is the Task Summary view, which displays a list of Projects and Tasks. It provides a grid to view all of your projects and task dating. There will be changes to this part of the system and it will move into Flash.