Skill administration

In the planner, planner overview and the skill overview pages, skills play an important role in planning and checking availability of employees with the right skills for the project elements they are planned on.

Example: when we want to plan an employee on a “Graphical design website” project element, we are only interested in the availability of employees that have the correct design skills to do the job.

Skill groups

“Skills” can be grouped into “Skill groups” to keep skills organized. There is no limit to the number of skills that can be used in the Calendar & planning module.

In the skills admin page (Calendar/Planning > Admin extra > Skills) the skills can be given a name, a description and a threshold. When we assign skills to employees, we can give the skill a score for each employee.

Figure 1 Skills administration page

Threshold

The threshold is the minimum value we find sufficient to mark the employee as possessing that skill. If, for example, we use a 0 to 10 scale to rate the employees’ knowledge of the French language, we don’t want to plan employees with a score below 6 to do a job that needs reading and speaking French. In that case, we use a threshold of 6 for this skill so only employee scoring 6 or higher will be shown in the “Calendar/Planning > Calendar > Skill overview” page.

Skills overview page

In the skills overview page “Calendar/Planning > Admin extra > Skills overview” we can set the scores for multiple employees and multiple skills in one matrix style overview.

Figure 2 Skills overview page

What scale is used to score a skill is free. If the type of skill only calls for yes or no the values 0 and 1 can be used.

Skill scores

The “Calendar/Planning > Admin extra > Skills scores” page is the same as the skills overview page, but it will only show the skill scores of the logged in user. If the employees are themselves responsible for maintaining the values of their skills, this page can be activated for the group they are part of.

Skills filtering

Filtering in planner

In the planner page “Calendar/Planning > Calendar > Planner” the skills that can be used to filter the employees are shown in the page.

skill

First the skill can be selected from the skill dropdown list. 

>, = or <

Next the comparison operator can be selected. In most comparisons the > (greater than) sign will be used in finding employees that have at least a certain skill level.

score

In the last filter field, the score value to filter on can be entered

The example below will display in the planner page all employees that have a score for the “English” skill that is higher than 6 (6 is not included).

If the sort checkbox is used, the employees will be shown with the highest scores first instead of the usual alphabetical ordering.

Filtering in planner overview

The filter options in the planner overview (Calendar/Planning > Calendar > Planner) are the same as the filtering options in the planner page (Calendar/Planning > Calendar > Planner overview).

Figure 3 Skills filtering in planner overview page

Skill overview

The skill overview is an overview that lets the user search for the availability of employees having a certain skill. Just like in the planner overview, the findings are presented on a weekly basis rather than on a daily basis as used in the planner page. The reports shows the availability of skills in three levels

Level 1: total available hours

The Skill overview will first show totals of all employees having the required skill at a skill level equal or larger than the skill threshold.

First the sum of the contract hours of all employees fitting the filter is shown, followed by total hours still available for these employees. The hours available are then also shown as a percentage of the total contract hours.

Level 2: total available hours per skill score

When clicking on the + sign shown to the left of the skill, the result is split into one record per skill score value. The same columns as in level one are shown here.

Level 3: total available hours per employee

When clicking on the + sign shown to the left of the skill score, the result is split into one record per employee. The same columns as in level one and level two are shown.

Figure 4 Skill overview pag