SECTIONSBest Practices for Resource Search at Enterprise Scale
Searching for resources in PSA combines suitability, attributes, and availability to return the best matches. This can be challenging in orgs with thousands of resources, as there are many resources to consider, meaning that it must process a large amount of data to reach its results.
This page explains how resource search can be used to quickly find the best resources, even in orgs with thousands of resources.
These best practices apply to the following features:
- PSA Resourcing Lightning Component (resource request page)
- Auto-Assignment of Resource Requests
- Assignments of multiple resources to project
- Resource Search Service API
How It Works
When searching large volumes of resource data, the org must balance its performance and stability with the quality of the results.
It achieves this with an intelligent approach that allows it to quickly narrow down and evaluate the most suitable resources for common types of request.
At a high level, this can be thought of as two steps:
- Filtering out all resources who do not match any essential criteria.
- Ranking the remaining resources on their suitability, based on any ideal, desirable, and suggested criteria, any desirable skills, and their availability.
For more information, see Intelligent Staffing for a Resource Request.
The ranking step is the hardest for the org, as all resources remaining after the filtering step need to be evaluated, and the volumes of data to consider can get very high.
Therefore, the lower the number of resources remaining after the filtering step, the easier it is for the org to complete the ranking step.
This consideration must be balanced against the needs of resource management teams, who typically handle a mixture of negotiable and non-negotiable criteria, and must pick the best option from a number of imperfect matches. Non-essential criteria and availability play a key role in this process, enabling the org to quickly surface the resources that are most likely to be a good match.
There is no exact rule, but you can expect the org to work best when the number of remaining resources after the filtering step is between 100 and 1,000.
Best Practices
If the volume of resources in your org is high, we recommend that you consider adopting these best practices to ensure the best resources are found quickly when resourcing work.
Setting More Essential Criteria
When searching for resources, set essential criteria that narrow down the pool of potential matches to between 100 and 1,000 resources.
You can do this in two ways:
- For role, region, practice, group, custom contact fields, and the Worked with Customer field, set the weightings of the most important criteria to “Essential”. In the PSA Resourcing Lightning Component, click
and make the adjustment. For all other features, and to set defaults for the PSA Resourcing Lightning Component, change the custom settings. For more information, see Resource Search Service Settings. - For skills and certifications, set the most important skills to “Essential” when creating resource requests. For more information, see Managing Resource Skill Requests on Resource Requests. If desirable skills are disabled in the custom settings, all skills are treated as essential.
Prioritizing Fields and Skills over Availability
Resource availability is the hardest resource attribute for the org to evaluate, as all the resource’s existing assignments and held resource requests must be checked for their impact on the resource’s availability. Therefore, applying all filtering steps before checking availability can significantly speed up the resource matching process.
Due to the prioritized way resources are evaluated, availability can be ranked as the first, second, or third in the match settings. We recommend you set it to third, or at least second. The most suitable resources will still be ranked by availability.
In the PSA Resourcing Lightning Component, click the Match Settings button and make the adjustment. For more information, see Using the Resource Filter in the PSA Resourcing Lightning Component. For all other features, and to set defaults for the PSA Resourcing Lightning Component, change the custom settings. For more information, see Resource Search Service Settings.
Avoiding Minimum Availability Filters
Minimum availability can be thought of as applying a filter based on availability in the filtering step. Therefore, it requires availability to be calculated for all resources who match the other essential criteria. We recommend you do not use this filter when searching large numbers of resources.
For more information, see Using the Resource Filter in the PSA Resourcing Lightning Component.
Combining Advice
You can combine the above advice into an overall best practice. For example, you can:
- Define some essential skills as well as some desirable skills in your resource requests.
- Weight region, practice, and role as "Essential", and role, custom fields and Worked With Customers differently.
- Prioritize Fields, then Skills, then Availability.
- Do not filter by minimum availability.
Potential Consequences of High Volumes
When processing these large volumes of data, the org must balance its performance and stability with the quality of the results.
The first sign of this is slower performance from resource matching features.
Beyond a certain volume, the org begins to limit the volume of data, and therefore the number of resources considered, to preserve its performance and stability. It is not possible to predict or control which resources are excluded. If that happens, all resources matched are correct matches, but other suitable resources might be excluded from the results.
In extreme cases, the org might be unable to return any results at all.