What are Placeholders?
Placeholders are used when you have a project to plan out but don't yet know who to assign to it. Or they can be used to represent demand- work that must be done.
By using placeholders, you can :
Assess all the work that is required to complete this project
Determine an approximate cost based on default role rates
Estimate revenue based on roles
Placeholders also assist you in finding the RIGHT PERSON for the project based on:
Roles
Skills
Custom fields - like location, education, preference, seniority
Most Availability
How do placeholders work?
Placeholder rates
Placeholder assignments take their charge out rate from the role rate of the project they are on. They are the same as normal assignments.
For example, if you add a Developer to Project A and the Developer Project Rate is $150, then the placeholder will have a rate of $150 too.This can act as an estimate. The rate can be changed once the work is transferred - ie to a more expensive resource.
Placeholder costs
You can set a custom hourly or daily cost for each placeholder or use the default hourly role cost. This will help you estimate the cost of the project. Once the work is transferred to a person, the cost rate will be specific to that person. But before that, the costs will be calculated based on the default role cost of that placeholder.Placeholders have a cost to the project but not to the business as a whole.
Past placeholder assignments
When a placeholder assignment appears in the past (or partially in the past) the value of the past hours is changed to 0. This is under the assumption that the work was no completed as it was never transferred to a real person.
Capacity and workload with placeholders
Placeholders do not affect the capacity of your business. This is because you may hire someone external to the business to do the work or transfer it to someone already within the business. The placeholder will, however, affect the workload.
As seen in the capacity and workload chart, the placeholder assignment only affects the workload (blue bars), and the capacity is unaffected (purple background).
Full-time equivalent (FTE)
For a person, the maximum you can schedule per day is 3 FTEs, which is equivalent to 24 hours. However, for placeholders, you can map out the demand for more than one person (> 1 FTE). You can add unlimited FTEs.
Learn more about how to Plan in FTEs here.
Managing Placeholders
Adding placeholders
Go to the Project Planner
Click the Assign Person or Placeholder button for a project
A placeholder 'person' will appear at the top of the pop-up box. Choose the placeholder's role (Note: the placeholder rates and costs will come from the role.)
If you want to add multiple placeholders to a project at once, you can also do that.
Click Add another placeholder (Note: You can also add people at the same time as placeholders.)
If you change your mind and decide not to add the placeholder, you can simply uncheck the box on your right, and the row will disappear.
Click Add Selected
Find the placeholder under the chosen project. Create assignments as normal.
Editing or deleting placeholders
Right-click or click on the three-dot menu on the placeholder
Click on Change Project Role if need.
Click on Edit Details to add more qualifiers like skills, custom fields, teams or tags. A side panel will appear. Click Save to update the changes.
4. To delete a placeholder, click the Delete option in the side panel
Cloning placeholders
Clone placeholders from the Project or People Planner to replicate a placeholder's assignments to more placeholders with the same role.
Right-click or click on the three-dot menu on the placeholder
Select Clone
Enter the number of placeholders you want to clone with the same assignments and role. If you do not want the assignments cloned, uncheck the box.
Click Clone to complete the process.
Transferring Placeholders to People
You can have 2 options when looking to transfer work over- select the transfer button or make a resource request so another member of the team can choose the right person and transfer the work.
1. Transferring from a placeholder to a person
Click the 3 dots next to the placeholder and choose "Find a person".
2. Based on the role, team and other parameters you entered like skills, the split screen will appear with the options. You can also click on Filter to add more parameters or click on "X" next to the filter choices to get other options.
3. Hover over "Transfer " to preview how the work will affect each person's schedule:
4. Click Transfer to complete the process. You may be prompted to determine the role if someone's default role is different than the placeholder's role:
Please note that this can also be done on the People Planner in the same workflow.
2. Resourcing Requests
Create requests and use them to communicate with relevant stakeholders through comments, various request statuses, and planner filters.
Instead of clicking on Transfer- click on Request.
To learn more about Resourcing Requests- click here.
Transferring Assignment to Placeholders
When an employee leaves or if you are trying to clear up a conflict, you can also use placeholders to simply the process. Simply transfer the assignments over to a placeholder and then use the process above to find the right person!
Click on the 3 dots next to the first assignment. If you wish to move all the work over, click on Select All. If you wish to transfer only a few, click on enable multi-select and click the assignment (Do not select assignments from multiple projects- these cannot be transferred to one placeholder) Click on Transfer
2. A split screen will appear. Toggle to the "Placeholder" option:
3. Either create a new placeholder or alternatively, use an existing on from this project and click the Transfer button.
