Project Roles

Define project roles with their own bill rates, add them from the client or workspace, and assign team members so one person can bill at multiple rates.

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. Inactive members appear dimmed within the stack. Hovering over a member’s avatar reveals a small remove button you can use to unassign that member from the role without opening it.

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

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.

Figure 1 - The Roles Section of the Settings Tab Allows Project Admins to Add Roles from the Client

Figure 2 - Select from a List of Client Roles to Add to the Project

Figure 3 - Roles Added from Client

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). The same menu also offers an Edit Member Assignments item, described below, for managing which members are assigned to the role.

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.

Figure 4 - Selecting Edit from the Action Menu will Allow you to Change Values on the Role

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; provide an hourly rate (for billable roles); and assign project team members to the new role using the Member Assignments section of the same form — the same way you would when editing an existing role’s member assignments.

Practices, locations, and disciplines are set by your Workspace Admin and they are used to group associated roles together for reporting purposes.

Figure 5 - Add a Role to the Project

Note that if a billable role is assigned to a non-billable task, the hours worked will be non-billable.

Assign Project Team Members to Roles

Once you have your project roles defined, you can then assign project team members to those roles. There are two ways to manage role assignments, both starting from the role’s row in the Roles section (Figure 1):

1. Edit the role. Select the Edit action item from the role’s action menu to open the role form. The Member Assignments section lists everyone currently assigned to the role, with a remove action next to each member. Click Add below the list to search for and add one member at a time (Figure 6).
2. Edit member assignments in bulk. Select the Edit Member Assignments action item from the role’s action menu to open a checklist of every project team member. Check or uncheck members to assign or unassign them from the role, then click Save & Close (Figure 7). This is the fastest way to assign or unassign several members at once.

Figure 6 - Managing Member Assignments from the Role Form

Figure 7 - Editing Member Assignments in Bulk

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.

You can also manage a single member’s role assignments from the member’s own row on the Team tab — useful when you want to review or change everything one person is assigned to.

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.

Delete a Role Assignment

You can delete a role assignment in any of the following ways:

• Hover over the member’s avatar in the role’s avatar stack (Figure 1) and click the remove button that appears. Ruddr will ask you to confirm before unassigning the member.
• Edit the role and click the remove action next to the member in the Member Assignments list (Figure 6).
• Uncheck the member from the Edit Member Assignments checklist (Figure 7).

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.

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).

Figure 8 - Deactivate a Project Role

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.