Project Staffing Request & Approval

The problem this kills

You need a back-end developer for three weeks. So you email the back-end team lead: "Can I borrow Priya?" They reply "maybe, let me check." You loop in another PM who also wants Priya. A spreadsheet gets forwarded. Someone books her anyway. Two weeks later you find out she was already 120% allocated and the real answer was always no.

Staffing-by-email is slow, invisible, and impossible to audit. Nobody can see who's actually free, requests get lost in inboxes, the same person gets double-booked, and when a project slips there's no record of who approved what or why a request was turned down.

What you'll build

A small internal web app where:

• A project manager submits a staffing request: the role and skills needed, the hours per week, and the start/end dates - against a specific project.
• The owning resource manager opens the request and immediately sees the candidate's existing load - how booked they already are over those same dates.
• The resource manager makes one human decision: approve, reject (with a reason), or counter-propose a different person (with a reason).
• An approved request becomes exactly one confirmed booking - no double-processing, no double-booking.
• The requester is notified by email the moment a decision is made.
• Everything exports to a clean CSV so it can flow into whatever system you actually run on.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a complete, paste-and-go runbook for an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It opens by interviewing you about your business - your roles, your skills taxonomy, how you measure capacity (hours? FTE? story points?), your approval routing, and your messy exceptions - so the tool is tailored to how you actually staff projects, not a generic template. It reflects a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up before it builds anything.

After that, it walks you step by step through:

• Standing up the database (people, skills, capacity, projects, requests, bookings) shaped to your answers.
• Login, so only your team gets in.
• The PM request form and the resource-manager review screen with the live load view.
• The approve / reject / counter-propose human gate.
• Email notifications via Resend.
• Duplicate guards and the one-request-one-booking rule.
• The CSV import (your capacity sheet) and CSV export (confirmed bookings) fallback so you can run it today with no integration.

Each build step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt you paste straight into your agent.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can use the tool.
• Row-level security so a PM or resource manager only ever sees their own organization's data.
• A complete audit trail - who submitted, who decided, what they decided, the reason, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - nothing becomes a confirmed booking until a resource manager reviews capacity and approves it. The tool drafts; a person commits.
• Duplicate guards - dedupe on request id, and one approved request can only ever create one booking.

Who it's for

• Project managers who are tired of begging for people over email and want a clear yes/no/here's-someone-else.
• Resource and line managers who own a team's time and need to see real capacity before they hand it out.

You don't need to be a developer. If you can describe how staffing works at your company, you can build this. You've got this - paste the first prompt.