Resource planning software
As a service provider, you can very easily manage your projects and employees with Timewax. Our resource management software makes for efficient project scheduling, no matter how far in the future you can see. You can share the resource planning with your employees by using your company’s calendar system or our mobile app.
Why bother scheduling projects?
Because you don’t want the issues of the day to sway you around and rule over your time during the next few days. To govern is to foresee. Creating a schedule is your weapon of choice. But how far in time should you schedule?
That depends to which extent you can foresee the future. When activities tend to be in the distant future, you will roughly outline them. You will schedule them, for example with a Gantt Chart, but you will refrain from planning them in detail.
Creating a work schedule
It is a best practice to allocate employees for the entire duration of the project. For upcoming activities, you should create operational schedules that clearly states which tasks you expect employees to carry out.
For big projects, you typically focus on the next four to six weeks. Each phase is broken down into activities and optionally sub-activities. Based on that, you will assign employees to the activities, just like in our Planning Board.
Creating a weekly schedule
Many companies organize their work weekly, which provides them with an exact cutoff point. Every week, they create a work schedule for the next week on which all employees can rely. Of course, it is not imperative to plan every week.
You can also schedule daily. A daily schedule is very common for companies that deal with technical malfunctions, which you can’t foresee ahead. You can only plan employees to deal with these malfunctions on the day they occur.
Essential aspects of scheduling time
In scheduling time, there are two aspects you need to consider: duration and resource management. With big projects, you have to deal with both aspects. With small projects, you primarily have to deal with resource management.
Which time?
The duration is the length of an activity. It does not say anything about the required capacity in terms of work-hours to complete it. An example: the duration of an activity can be five days, but from a capacity point of view, you need 160 hours.
Scheduling activities in duration is helpful when the project takes more than four weeks and involves multiple activities and employees. For smaller jobs, scheduling the time is something you can skip by directly moving on with planning the required capacity.
Scheduling duration
The first thing to do is breaking down the project in phases and activities. As a next step, you will start scheduling the duration. For each activity, you will set the start and end date, and you will also determine which activities are dependent on each other.
In Timewax, you schedule the duration of activities with the Gantt Chart feature. Planning with the Gantt Chart creates a visualization of the project. You can use this visualization for communicating the project with your clients and the project team.
Resource management
Resource management takes care of assigning the employees that will carry out projects. Based on the Gantt Chart and the number of budgeted hours, you schedule the necessary resources. In Timewax, you plan resources with the Planning Board.
With Analytics and with the Utilization feature, you can analyze project results and the productivity of your organization by department, position and resources to spot issues. You can’t control everything, and it’s safe to assume that not everything will go according to plan. Service providers need resource management software that helps them deal with contingencies. Propper data analyzation gives you a good view of the performance and available resources. This way, you can step up your game in resource planning.
Integrations
We developed several integrations with other systems so that you don’t have to manage the same data in more than one system manually. Are you a techie? Use our API to develop your own integrations.
Clients depend on us
We have worked with small and large corporations in a wide range of industries. Our clients need to schedule projects and resources on a day-to-day basis to guarantee the best service and project delivery to their clients. That’s where our project management software comes in.
Want to know more about our resource management software?
Would you like to try our project and resource management software solutions for free? We invite you to get your 30-day free trial and start saving time today.