Introduction

In today’s fast-paced and resource-constrained environment, organizations are under increasing pressure to deliver results with the right people with the right skills and roles at the right time. Workforce requests and the workforce allocation process play a critical role in balancing business demand with available capacity, ensuring that skills, priorities, and timelines are aligned.

A structured approach to workforce requests provides transparency into staffing needs, while a well-defined allocation process helps leaders make informed decisions across teams, projects, and departments. When managed effectively, these processes reduce bottlenecks, prevent over or under-utilization of talent, and support strategic goals without compromising employee engagement.

This blog explores the process of how workforce requests are initiated, evaluated, and approved, and how allocation decisions are made using the ENOVIA Project Planner (XPP-OC) and Workforce Manager (XWO-OC) roles to support both organizational performance and employee experience.

Note: This solution is available only on cloud, as both Project Planner and Workforce Manager roles are available only on cloud. 

Personas involved

The mentioned above process involves four different personas, as shown below:

The Process

Step #1 – Create workforce Request 

Persona - Request Owner

Application – Project Planning web app (Project Planner XPP-OC role)

1. Create workforce requests (User Profiles), which indicate the resource needs for the project. 

Note: to create a user profile you need to have both 'Project Planner' (XPP-OC) and 'Workforce Manager' (WXO-OC) roles assigned to you.

2. The User Profile is used to capture the request for the resource and include:

   1. Required capabilities (Skills and Business Roles)

   2. Required capacity (Duration and the Workload Percentage)

3. Once the request is ready, perform the following to initiate analysis and assignment stage:
   1. Assign Resource Matcher 

   2. Promote the user profile to 'In Work' state 

Step #2 – Propose Candidate 

Persona – Resource Matcher

Application – Workforce Management web app (Workforce Manager XWO-OC role)

1. Open the 'Workforce Allocation' page to work on workforce requests.

2. Access all 'In Work' requests grouped by projects, either from:

   1. 'My Requests & Approvals' side panel 

   2. 'Workforce Allocation Needs' section 

    

3. Select the request and use 'Show Suggestion' to get color indication how suitable the users are. 

The color indication is based on:

a. Availability

b. Business Roles

c. Skills

4. Assign the request to selected candidate by dragging and dropping the request from the 'Workforce Allocation Needs' panel to the ' Workforce Users' panel to the respective candidate row.

5. Confirm the proposal to promote the request to 'Proposed' maturity state and initiate the approval stage.

Step #3 – Approve / Reject suggestion

3.1 Approve / Reject suggestion by Request Owner 

Persona - Request Owner

Application – Project Planning web app (Project Planner XPP-OC role)

1. View the suggested Candidate and approve it by promoting the User Profile (workforce request) to 'Under Review'

3.2 Approve / Reject suggestion by Request Approver (direct manager of the Candidate)

Persona – Approver (the candidate's Direct Manager)

Application – Workforce Management web app (Workforce Manager XWO-OC role)

Approve or reject the request either from:

1. 'My Requests & Approvals' side panel 

2. 'Workforce Allocation Details' section 

Summary:

The diagram below summarizes the end-to-end workforce request and allocation process, highlighting the key stages throughout the request lifecycle:

Note:

Workforce Management automatically skips unnecessary steps when the same person performs more than one role. 
For example: If Request Owner and Approver are the same person -> The Owner's acceptance automatically finalizes the approval.

Refer to the following video for a more comprehensive illustration of the process: