Group people into resource pools

When you plan a project you rarely think "I need Sarah Chen for this stage"; you think "I need an architect's worth of capacity." A resource pool lets you plan in exactly those terms: a named group of people you treat as one for assigning work, applying rates, and granting permissions.

We'll build the Architect pool for Northlight Architects, put Priya Sharma in it, give it default rates, and use it to staff Riverside Apartments before the final cast is decided.

How Monument thinks about a pool

Two ideas make pools worth using.

A pool has shared capacity. A pool's available hours are the sum of its members' available hours. So when you assign work to the Architect pool, you're drawing down that shared total, not any one person's week. Book the pool heavily and you can spend everyone's spare capacity at once, which is why a whole pool lane can turn red on the schedule even when no individual looks maxed out. That's the pool telling you the truth: you've planned more work than the group actually has hands for. You read and rebalance that in the resource swimlanes.

Plan with a pool now, swap a person in later. Assign the Architect pool to Concept Design today, while you still don't know who'll run it. The stage gets realistic hours, cost, and revenue immediately. When the team firms up, plan with the Architect role, then hand the work to a named person without redoing the numbers. The pool is a placeholder with real capacity behind it.

Create the pool

Start the pool and decide how membership works.

1. 1

   Create a new pool and name it Architect. Add a short description so colleagues know what it's for.

2. 2

   Leave Manual membership ticked to add people by hand.

3. 3

   Create the pool.

Add members and set default rates

Open the pool and fill it out. You can add existing staff or create a new person inline without leaving the panel.

1. 1

   In the pool's Members section, click Add and search for Priya Sharma. Not on file yet? Create the staff member right from the search and they're added when saved.

2. 2

   Set the Default Billing Rate to Senior Architect Charge-out, two hundred dollars an hour, and the Default Cost Rate to Default Cost Rate, one hundred and fifty.

   
3. 3

   Click Save Changes to persist Architect with Priya Sharma and its two rate defaults.

Use the pool on the schedule

The payoff is in planning. On Riverside Apartments, assign the Architect pool to a stage instead of a named person. The stage draws on the pool's shared capacity, and the pool's lane on the schedule fills toward its combined line. Later, hand part of the work to Priya Sharma or another member, and the hours move from shared to named while the forecast holds.

Troubleshooting

• The pool lane is red but every member looks fine. Capacity is shared. Several stages drawing on the same pool add up against the combined total, so the pool tips over before any one person does. Spread the work out or pull some onto named people with room; see balance capacity in the swimlanes.
• A member isn't picking up the pool's rate. They have an override, or aren't set to inherit from this pool. Open the person and switch them back to inheriting, or clear the override. Rates live in rates and rate history.
• There's a default pool you didn't create. Organisations come with a default pool so rates and permissions have somewhere to live from day one. You can use it as-is or build your own alongside it.

Where this fits next

Your pool can now stand in for real people while respecting how many hands you have. From here:

• Make the pool's money right with rates and rate history.
• Keep its shared capacity honest as members take time off with leave and holidays.
• Plan and rebalance the pool's load on the Gantt with balance capacity in the swimlanes.