Planning in a shrinking organization
If the demand and/or turnover drops, structurally, we speak of shrinkage. In a shrinking organization you need to get a grip on the biggest expenditure, namely the employment of employees. We explain our vision on shrinking below, from the perspective of employee planning through innovative plans.
The art of scheduling a breakdown service
Many organizations that do project-based work offer products that should be available to customers 24 hours a day. This includes web applications, IT infrastructure and production lines. No product or service is perfect and everything can break. So there must be someone who can immediately communicate with the customer in case of a problem and who can provide a solution. To facilitate this, you must start scheduling a breakdown service and schedule employees for that breakdown service. Customers regularly ask us
Capacity planning vs. To-do planning
Companies sometimes report to us with the remark that they want to start planning. If we keep asking questions, it becomes clear what they actually mean by that. Some are looking for a tool for capacity planning to plan the working day of their employees. Others just want a tool to manage a to-do list. They want to be able to attach a deadline and project information to those to-dos. The time the employee performs the task is not certain,
From accounting for hours to being the boss of your own schedule
In some organizations, such as architecture firms, we find that employees on long-term projects are scheduled for an average number of hours per week for the duration of the project. These independent professionals are then allowed to decide for themselves each week when and how much time they spend on each project. The result is that the hours actually spent rarely correspond to the number of average hours scheduled.
Using capacity utilization rate to gain scheduling insights
The sales department really wants to land that one project and get it done fast, but is there room for it in the schedule? Despite regular demands made on management to hire more staff, convincing them can be more difficult than expected. After all, we always manage to get things done - just about - with current staffing levels, don't we? In this blog we discuss how you can use the capacity utilization rate to have evidence-based discussions with, say,
Planning resources based on skills
You don't have to be a huge organization to have a large pool of resources, because a resource is not only a permanent employee, it can also be a freelancer or a subcontractor. From experience, we've seen from our users that when a planner has more than 25 resources at his or her disposal, it becomes a greater challenge to keep track of who is good at what. The problem is that planners who lose track of their available resources
Planning as a dictator or as a democrat
Good planning is indispensable for a project-oriented organization with several employees. Sound planning allows you to optimize productivity within set hours, which enables your employees to work efficiently and processes to run smoothly within your organization. Nevertheless, many companies fail to find the correct method of planning for themselves.
Who needs a complete overview of staff leave?
It's April, and the majority of your colleagues are probably busy planning and booking their holidays. Chances are that, as a manager in charge of staff leave, you're already knee-deep in a pile of leave applications, with more streaming in. So, how do you determine who is eligible for leave? Everyone is entitled to a holiday, but how do you ensure that your organization will continue to operate smoothly in their absence? And how do you ensure that you don't
6 wastes in resource planning
Waste is around us everywhere, every day, including in projects. You have probably heard of the Lean method. This method was originally used only by production companies, but is now also being used in other business sectors. One of the priorities of Lean is to eradicate waste. In this blog we will look at how we can apply this in the world of project-driven service providers.