Project Roles

Professional services engagements often require a wide range of skills. Ruddr allows you to define these various skills in the form of project roles. Roles are optional, but it is a best practice to leverage them. Often these roles and corresponding bill rates are defined in the proposal and legal contract with the client. For smaller engagements or teams, project roles may be unnecessary. The Roles section (Figure 1) of the project’s Settings tab allows you to manage project roles and assign project team members to those roles. In order to edit a project, you must have access to the project and also have the Edit project permission set on your security role. Each role row shows the role’s assigned members as a stack of avatars, along with the role’s practice, location, discipline, and bill rate. One advantage of using roles is that they allow a single team member to bill at different bill rates on the same project. This is possible because each role has its own bill rate and team members can be assigned to multiple roles. When roles are not used, each team member can be assigned only a single bill rate for the project. There are two ways to add project roles to the project:

1. Add roles from the client
2. Create roles for the project

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Add Roles from the Client or the Workspace

Ruddr provides workspace admins with the ability to define workspace-level Project Roles and Rates within the Custom Data section of Workspace Settings. Once these roles are established, they are available to be used on clients and project throughout the workspace. In addition to inheriting project roles from the workspace, new roles can be added to clients to establish a client “rate card”. For more on these roles, please refer to the Client Roles article in the Ruddr Help Center. If roles have indeed been established for the client, those roles can be added to projects. In the Roles section (Figure 1), click the + button at the top-right of the roles list. The menu offers Add Client Roles, which will present a list of available client project roles (Figure 2). You can search the list to find the roles you need. Selecting one or more of these roles will add the role and the corresponding rate to the project (Figure 3). The Add All Client Roles option adds every client role in one step. In addition to adding client roles, you can also choose to add roles directly from the list of workspace roles. If you select the Add Workspace Roles option from the same menu, you can select which workspace roles to add to the project. Once a role has been added from the client or the workspace, the role can be edited as needed to correspond to the terms of the project. This is a different behavior from workspace-inherited roles on the client; there, roles cannot be edited. On a project, however, roles / rates can be modified to meet the terms associated with the project. To edit a role, select the Edit action item (Figure 4) from the action menu located at the end of a row in the Project Roles list (Figure 3). Note that any changes to roles / rates at the client level will NOT propagate down to the project or effect any prior time entries logged to that project role.

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Create New Project Roles

To create a new project role, click the + button at the top-right of the roles list (Figure 1) and select Add Project Role. This will allow you to type in the name of the new role (Figure 5); optionally select a role location, practice, and / or discipline; set the role as either billable or non-billable; set the currency for the role’s bill rate; and provide an hourly rate (for billable roles). Practices, locations, and disciplines are set by your Workspace Admin and they are used to group associated roles together for reporting purposes. Note that if a billable role is assigned to a non-billable task, the hours worked will be non-billable.

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Assign Project Team Members to Roles

Once you have your project roles defined, you can then assign project team members to those roles. Role assignments are managed on the role itself. Select the Edit action item from the action menu on the role’s row, then choose the members in the Member Assignments field of the role form (Figure 6). You can assign the same team member to multiple project roles if needed. Once a team member is assigned to a project role, that member will be able to record time to the project and role within the time tracking area. NOTE: When a member has a single role assignment on a project and that project’s Members can only track time to assigned roles setting is enabled, Ruddr automatically selects that role when time is entered. The member will not be prompted to choose a role.

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Delete a Role Assignment

You can delete a role assignment by editing the role and removing the member from the Member Assignments field of the role form (Figure 6). When a role assignment is deleted, any existing time entries associated with that role assignment remain unchanged. Role assignments can always be deleted regardless of whether or not they have existing time entries associated with them.

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Delete or Deactivate a Role

A project role can be deleted or disabled by using the menu on the right side of the row (Figure 1). There are times when the delete option will not be enabled but you always have the ability to deactivate a role (Figure 8). A role cannot be deleted if either of the following is true:

• One or more project team members are assigned to the role.
• There are existing time entries associated with the role.

In these cases, the role can be deactivated but not deleted.