Pre Assignment

Resource technique · See it on the map

Runnable here

Naming who will do the work before the project is even approved or planned.

When to use it

Use it when the assignment is already a fact you can't undo: a proposal or contract named a specific person or firm, a specialist skill exists in exactly one person in the business, or a sponsor made the assignment a condition of funding the project at all.

When to avoid it

Don't reach for pre-assignment as a convenience just because a name comes to mind first. Locking an assignment before the plan exists removes a degree of freedom you may need later: if the schedule shifts and that person is unavailable in the window that now matters, there is no fallback because no one else was ever considered. Run the estimate first and pre-assign only what genuinely cannot be otherwise.

Steps

1. Write down the specific reason the assignment is fixed (contract clause, unique skill, sponsor condition) — if you can't state one, it isn't a pre-assignment, it's a preference.
2. Record the person and role in the plan before activity resource estimating happens for that work, so estimators treat it as a constraint rather than an open question.
3. In Driftless, create or select the Person record and set the task's assignee at planning time rather than leaving it blank for later triage.
4. Check that person's capacity in hours against everything else already pointing at them — a pre-assignment made in isolation is exactly the assignment most likely to over-allocate someone, because it was decided before the rest of the plan existed.

What it produces

• A named assignee attached to specific tasks before general resource planning begins
• A documented reason the assignment was fixed rather than estimated, for anyone auditing the plan later

Common pitfalls

• Treating every stakeholder's casual suggestion as a pre-assignment, which quietly fills the team roster with names before anyone has checked whether the people are actually free.
• Forgetting to re-check capacity once the rest of the schedule is built — the pre-assigned person can end up double-booked because their slot was reserved first and never revisited.
• Using pre-assignment to avoid a hard staffing conversation instead of having it; the assignment looks settled but the underlying shortage hasn't gone anywhere.

Worked example

A regional bakery chain wins a contract to supply a grocery partner, and the contract names the chain's head baker, Priya, as the person who must sign off on the new product line's recipe scaling. The PM sets Priya as assignee on the recipe-scaling task the day the project is chartered, before any other activity resource estimating happens, and flags in the plan that the assignment is contractual, not a scheduling convenience.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §9.3.2.3

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.