Resource Calendar

Term Definition
A resource calendar is a calendar that is used to reflect specific working hours, vacations, leaves of absence, and planned personal time for individual resources. A resource calendar differs from a base calendar in that it only reflects working and non-working times for individual resources.
A base calendar will contain this information for a set of resources.

Resource calendars can be used for human resources as well as equipment. Resource calendars help organizations in their resource planning. It would be impossible to run an organization, if you did not know when employees would be on vacation, leave or what shifts they were working. For example, if John is a security analyst who works the 2nd shift and you have a project that requires a security analyst on the 1st shift, a resource calendar would provide you with that data so that you did not allocate the resource inappropriately. In another example, if the organization has three technicians, and two will be on vacation for the same week, you would not schedule the two absent technicians for projects the weeks that they are on vacation.

Organizations may also create shared resource calendars to manage a resource pool. A resource pool makes it easier to administer people, or even equipment assigned to tasks, in more than one project file. Using automation enables you to centralize resource information, such as the resource name, calendar used, resource units, and cost rate tables.

Resource calendars are an important aspect of workforce planning. Calendars can be particularly helpful to global organizations. A resource calendar can include regional availability. Using automation to manage this aspect facilitates the process. For example, an organization could simply define the days that are considered holidays. The holidays could be grouped into a set, such as European Holidays. If the organization also had offices in the United States, a holiday set could be created for that region as well. This expedites the planning process as information is easily accessed across the organization.

Related Terms
Availability

Your Comments and Recommendations

Please help us improve the project management software glossary. Was this term well described? Any suggestions of how we can improve the description, what to add, remove or change? You can also use this form to suggest new project management terms we should add to the glossary.