5 min read

Feature

Resource management is the process of planning the use of your resources and scheduling out their allocation. Resources can be anything your business needs in order to operate effectively— employees, equipment, or even your brand assets. Whatever your resources may be, monday.com is here to help you keep your business on track! 

Note: This feature is available for our Pro and Enterprise plans only

Before you start

To measure the workload of your team members, you'll want to make sure your boards contains the following columns: 

• A People Column 
• A Date or a Timeline Column 
• Optional - A Number or Formula Column to indicate effort required for each task; i.e. 1 hour, 6 hours

Alternatively, if you want to measure any other resources, such as meeting rooms, factory machines, hand tools, cameras - you name it - you can use a Status or Dropdown Column!

Another important setting to consider is the weekend. You can either count the weekends as working days or exclude them from the working days. You can customize this setting in the admin section of your account. Check out this article to learn more. 

How to add the view to your board 

To add the Workload View to your board, click on the option at the top of your board (it will say "Add View" when you hover over it). Select "More views" and search for "Workload" in the Views Center:

You can also add a new board view by clicking on "Board Power-Ups" in the upper right corner of your screen. Select "Board Views" and choose "Workload" from the Views Center:

How to add the widget to your Dashboard

To add the Workload View widget to your Dashboard or Dashboard View, click on "+ Add widget" and select "Workload":

Setting up the view

Step 1 - Build your board

Let's say we are managing our Customer Success Team. In our board, we have:

• A People Column to assign each task to one or more team members
• A Timeline or Date Column to define the time frame of the task 
• Optional - A Numbers Column that we are using as a time estimation for each task. 

Step 2 - Choose the time column 

Since this view checks all items assigned to a person over a certain time period, your board must have either a Date or Timeline Column. 

Step 3 - Choose the resource type

Now you need to choose which resource type you want to be represented on the workload. The resource type can be any column on your board, or a group or board. This will determine according to what parameters we see the workload divided.

Step 4 - Measure the effort

You can display the data in two ways: count item and effort. 

• Count Item

If you choose Count items, each item that is assigned to that person will be counted as 1 and displayed on the board. 

• Effort

Sometimes, some of our tasks take more effort or carry more weight to the project. In this case, we are using the Time Estimation Column. That setting works with both a Numbers or Formula Column. We can toggle to define whether our effort is defined by the number of items ("Count Items") or by effort required to complete tasks. 

When more than one person is working on a task, we can choose to display how they "divide the effort" between them. We can toggle between "Split", which will divide the effort equally amongst partners, and "Sum", which will assign each of the partners the total number of hours that the project takes.

Show me an example

In the example below, we chose "Split", because Kayla and Ariel are going to split the four hours allotted for this project evenly in two. On the view, we can see that they have each been assigned 2 hours for this project. If Kayla and Ariel were working together on the project, and they would both be spending 4 hours, we would select "Sum", and we would see all 4 hours reflected in Kayla's workload as well as in Ariel's workload

• Present workload as number or percentage

You have the option to present your bubbles as numbered tasks or by calculating the percentage each bubble is of your total workload. 

• Weekly Capacity

Once done, we can then choose a weekly capacity for the entire team. This will be the limit of how many hours you want the team to be working on those tasks in that week. In our example, we set up the week's capacity to 20 hours per week. 

Note: If you are viewing your view's calendar by weeks, the colors of the circles will reflect the capacity you set. However, if you change the calendar to view by days, the capacity will be divided evenly by the 5 working days of the week. In other words, the weekly capacity of 20 hours will be split by 5, and will appear as 4 hours per day of the week.

You can customize each team member's weekly capacity, change the capacity for the team as a whole, and even tick the box to apply a default maximum capacity to each team member equally. 

Note: Similarly, if you view your widget by months, your weekly capacity of 5 will be multiplied by 4 weeks in a month, showing you a monthly capacity of 20. This may or may not reflect your intentions when setting your weekly capacity, so it's important to keep this in mind.

• Color by 

Choose to color the item bars in your workload by any of your columns, groups, or boards. Go to "Color By" in the settings menu to color items according to a category of your choosing to give you certain information at a glance. The colors shown are the colors you already have chosen for your board's Main Table View. For example, if you choose "Status", your items will be colored by the color that represents each label in your board's Status Column. 

Allocating Resources

With the Workload, you can allocate people but also any resources. In the example below, we want to make sure that none of our vehicles are surpassing their weekly limit of 1200 total kilometers of travel distance. We can set our Workload View to show us exactly that!

First, we select our "Vehicle" Status Column as our resource type, and then we can select "Add Effort"! We want to define our effort by our "Travel Distance" Numbers Column, and then enter "1200" in the "Weekly Capacity" field below. 

Now, our view is showing us all of our vehicles listed in the left panel, and to their right, we can see how many kilometers they are scheduled to travel each day of the week. We can see that our Ford is set to exceed its limit on the 13th, so we can go ahead and schedule a different vehicle for this delivery instead!

Understanding the colors 

• Blue bubble - The person has reached capacity
• Light blue bubble with a darker bubble in the center - The person is below the maximum amount of effort. The size of the inner circle reflects how close the person is to reaching capacity
• Red Bubble - The person has gone over the Weekly Capacity limit that was set

Understanding the results

Let's go back to our Customer Success board example. Here, Ariel has been assigned to two tasks, taking 1 and 2 hours respectfully.  

To understand the results, we need to look at two factors:

1. How many hours it takes to complete the task
2. How many days we have to complete it.  

Let's go back to our board: 

In this example, recording a video takes 4 hours of work and needs to be completed within 8 working days excluding the weekends. This means that every day, we will need to put 0.5 hours of work toward this task. This is just a simple math equation: 

Formula:  Number of hours to complete the task / Number of working days

Drill down for more details

If you want to have a closer look at the team's tasks, you can click on any of the circles and see the tasks listed on that timeframe.

If you have any questions, please reach out to our team right here. We’re available 24/7 and happy to help.