Resources & Skills

TruePPM models the people who do the work as resources. Resources live in a Workspace-wide catalog, carry skills at a proficiency level, join a project roster, and get assigned to tasks at a fractional capacity. When you assign someone, TruePPM surfaces soft warnings if their skills don’t match the task or if they’re overcommitted.

The resource catalog

A resource has a name, email, job role, an optional calendar (to model individual availability), and a max units value expressing capacity — 1.0 is a full-time equivalent, 0.5 is half-time. Resources are Workspace-level: create them once and use them across projects. Removing a resource soft-deletes it, so historical assignments stay intact, and it can be restored later.

Skills and proficiency

A skill is a Workspace-level tag (optionally grouped into a category). Tag a resource with the skills they have at one of three proficiency levels — Beginner, Intermediate, or Expert. Skill names are de-duplicated case-insensitively, so “React” and “react” resolve to the same skill.

Tag skills inline from a resource’s detail panel: choose a proficiency, then search the catalog under + Add skill. Each selection is added immediately and the search clears, so you can tag several skills in a row; skills already on the resource are hidden from the results.

Rosters and assignments

Project roster — add resources to a project before (or without) assigning them to specific work. A roster entry can override the resource’s job role or capacity for that project.
Task assignment — assign a resource to a task at a fractional units value (e.g. 0.5 for half their capacity). Assigning someone who isn’t yet on the roster adds them automatically.

Assignments across projects

Opening a person’s card in the Workspace resource catalog will answer the first question a resource manager has — what is this person working on? The detail panel will gain an Assignments section that lists every task the resource is assigned to, across every project, grouped by project. Each task row links to that task in its project schedule, and each project heading links to that project’s allocation view, so you can drill from the catalog straight into the work.

Every row shows the task’s status, percent complete, and the resource’s allocation on that task (the raw units fraction of their capacity). A neutral summary — for example “3 tasks across 2 projects” — sits at the top. The view is read-only: it projects the assignments that already exist and lets you read the load yourself. It does not compute a utilization score, flag overallocation, or roll up across programs — cross-program resource leveling and portfolio heat maps remain part of the Enterprise edition.

Because task and project names are project-scoped, the Assignments section is visible only to resource managers — org admins (Admin or Owner on at least one project). Other users still see the rest of the resource card (role, capacity, skills) but not the assignments list.

Skill-fit and overallocation warnings

You can attach skill requirements to a task — the skills (and minimum proficiency) the work needs. When you assign a resource, TruePPM evaluates the fit and returns it with the assignment:

Exact — the resource meets every requirement.
Partial — some requirements met, some short on proficiency.
Missing — the resource lacks one or more required skills (listed explicitly).

Separately, if a resource’s committed allocation across active tasks exceeds their max units, the assignment comes back with an overallocation warning. Both checks are soft — they inform the assigner but never block the assignment, so you stay in control.

Team utilization on the project Overview

The project Overview carries a Team utilization KPI card: this week’s committed load as a percentage of the team’s working capacity. It is computed from the same calendar-aware engine as the resource heatmap — hours per day × units × working days, with a resource’s own calendar winning over the project’s — so the Overview card and the heatmap cannot disagree about how loaded a team is.

Three details are worth knowing:

The window is the current week (Monday–Sunday). The card answers “how loaded is this team now”, so work scheduled for next month does not raise it. A project-lifetime average would read as calm straight through a crunch week.
Everyone measured counts on both sides. The population is the project roster plus anyone holding an assignment this week. A rostered person with no assignments is idle capacity and lowers the percentage; someone assigned without being on the roster still brings their own capacity, so they cannot show up as a phantom overallocation. A per-project capacity override on the roster wins over the resource’s default max units.
A task’s load is measured over its full span, not its remaining work.

Windowing utilization on the task span rather than the remaining-work window ships in TruePPM 0.4, the first beta. It is not present in the current release: before 0.4, an in-progress task’s contribution to the heatmap and the Team utilization card shrinks as percent_complete rises, and can drop out of the window entirely once its remaining-work window no longer intersects the query range.

The heatmap and the Team utilization card both window a task’s assignments on its span (scheduled_start through finish — see the bar vs. the remaining-work window), not on the narrower remaining-work window that early_start shrinks toward as a task approaches completion. A person’s allocation on a task does not shrink just because they finished part of it — reporting progress moves a task closer to done; it does not delete the load they were assigned in the first place.

0% is a real reading — it means nobody is allocated this week. When the ratio is genuinely undefined the card is muted and says why, rather than showing a blank:

The card says	It means
`Needs people on the project roster`	The project has no roster and no assignments, so there is nothing to measure.
`Roster has no working hours this week`	Everyone on the roster is at zero capacity, or every calendar is closed for the whole week.

Clicking the card opens the Team view, which is available to the Scheduler role and above; for a Member or Viewer the card is a static read rather than a link into a permission error.

What a resource manager can do today

Maintain the Workspace resource catalog (name, email, role, capacity, calendar).
Maintain the Workspace skill catalog and tag resources with proficiency.
Build per-project rosters with role and capacity overrides.
Assign resources to tasks at fractional capacity.
Define per-task skill requirements and see skill-fit on assignment.
See overallocation warnings when someone is overcommitted.
View project utilization across the team, on the resource heatmap and as a this-week percentage on the project Overview.
See, from a resource’s card, every task they are assigned to across all projects — grouped by project, read-only (ships in 0.4).
Deactivate and restore resources; remove them from a roster (cascading task assignments when forced).

API

The catalog and assignment surfaces are exposed under /api/v1/resources/, /api/v1/skills/, /api/v1/resource-skills/, /api/v1/project-resources/, /api/v1/task-resources/, and /api/v1/task-skill-requirements/. Reading resources requires any authenticated user. Editing the resource catalog requires the Project Manager or Project Admin role on at least one project; editing the skill catalog, rosters, and task assignments requires the Resource Manager role or above on at least one project.

A read-only cross-project assignments feed for one resource is exposed at GET /api/v1/resources/{id}/assignments/ (ships in 0.4). Unlike /api/v1/task-resources/?resource=, it is not scoped to the caller’s own projects — it returns the full cross-project set — so it requires org-admin (resource-manager) access.