Bookings and assignments
Bookings are the hard or soft allocation of resources to a project. Hard bookings consume a resource's capacity. Bookings represent organizational concepts for teams so that they can understand how resources will be engaged across various projects. Project Operations considers bookings as a project-level concept.
Assignments are the commitment of resources to project tasks in the project schedule. The resources can be named or generic.
Typically, the sum of the bookings for a resource will equal the sum of the resource's assignments across one or many tasks.
However, Project Operations doesn't enforce this agreement. The Resource Reconciliation view shows the project manager places where a resource's bookings and assignments don't agree.
Resource reconciliation view
For team members, bookings and assignments are loosely coupled. In other words, resources can have assignments but no bookings, or they can have bookings but no assignments. Ideally, bookings and assignments should be aligned so that resources have committed capacity to perform the task assignments. However, the bookings might be based on availability, and task timings might change as the project continues. Therefore, the loose coupling of bookings and assignments provides flexibility.
The Resource Reconciliation tab on the Project page lets project managers reconcile team members' bookings and their assignments for project teams.
The Resource Reconciliation tab also shows bookings and assignments down to the level of the individual task assignment for each team member. Hours are displayed in cells that represent time periods from months down to days.
The tab shows an overall net total for the project, together with a Total column.
For each resource, the tab calculates the difference between the team member's bookings and a rollup of the team member's task assignments. Ideally, this difference should be zero (0). In other words, no differences should exist between bookings and assignments.
Differences are colored and shaded to draw attention to two conditions:
Booking shortage – A booking shortage occurs when a resource has more assignments than bookings. Because this capacity hasn't been reserved, a project manager might want to correct this condition by extending the resource's bookings to cover the deficit.
Excess bookings – Excess bookings occur when a resource has been booked to the project but hasn't been assigned to tasks. This condition might be acceptable in the cases where the resource was booked to the project before task assignment occurred. However, in other cases, the resource isn't planned to be assigned to tasks. In these cases, the project manager should consider canceling the resource's bookings so that the capacity can be used for another project.