Resource planning and forecast - or having an overview of everyone and everything.
Simple resource management with intuitive allocation, increased visibility, and flexible planning features.
Easily visualize and balance team workload to avoid burnout or under-utilization. Re-prioritize projects and redistribute hours flexibly and in real time across assignee’s with elapseit simple drag-and-drop interface.
Quickly visualize each team member’s schedule and projects — who’s doing what and how long each task will take. Minimize conflicts and underutilized resources by gaining better insight into team availability.
The planning is also used to pre-populate the time sheets making elapseit a time tracking solution so easy that everyone will love to use it.
Allocate resources, get accurate forecast!
Allocating hours on projects in the tool is not mandatory for people in your team to start the work, but it’s highly recommended.
Although elapseit allows you to make allocations from Projects or People/Management module, we recommend you make the planning from Resourcing module. Why? Because, as opposed to the Management module, where you can see only one people view or one project view at a time, in Resourcing you are able to see the “big picture” with all people’s availability and all projects.
When you make allocations using People view window, you’ll see a list with all resources available and their workload, which is very useful if you want to avoid allocating on your project someone who’s full time booked already on other projects; this view allows you to see who has initiated a leave request workflow (even if the request is pending for approval), which makes the resources planning even more efficient. The same way, if you are in the Projects view, you can see all project with their phases, activities and tasks and the corresponding budgeted hours.
After you saved the allocated hours, they will be seen in in both People and Project views and also in the Timesheet of each person selected to work on the project; they get a notification in the tool about the allocations and via email if chosen so.
Smart planning.
You can choose between two types of allocations: total hours or hours per day. Depending on what type of allocation you choose, you can add the number of hours and then the specific time period when these hours should be logged. You can opt for a recurring allocation, just remember the recurrence can be set either weekly or monthly and it’s connected to the set allocation dates; this means that, for instance, if you want to set a weekly recurrence, you need to select a maximum 7 days allocation period. When making the allocations, you can decide whether the weekend days should be considered business days or not. And no worries, elapseit will consider global bank holidays when you make the planning.
Just in case you want to assign more people on the same project with the same number of allocated hours, elapseit allows you to do it very quickly, by clicking on “add multiple allocations” and select whoever should be part of your project team. Don’t worry about allocating the same person twice on the same project; you can avoid this by checking “Ignore people with overlapping allocations” box. You can remove more people at the same time by clicking on “remove multiple allocations”.
And to make it even prettier for you, elapseit allows you to export allocations from Resourcing module to Tasks module and to import tasks to allocations with just a few clicks. Just consider that, if you want to see a task in allocations, you have to introduce a start and end date first.
Who do you need on your project?
To make the allocation process easier, you can use the left sidebar to apply some filters; for instance, if you need a Senior Software Developer and a Software Tester to work on your project, you can go to Job titles bar and select only these two roles to see who’s available to get on board. But sometimes people are more skillful than a job title can express, so you might need to find someone with a very specific skill to get the job done; and for exactly this reason we added a “Skills” filter to help you make a perfect project team selection.
Also, if your company has both people and clients all over the world, you might want, if possible, to allocate to a specific client someone from the same country, for a closer touch; in this case, you can use the “Location” filter.
A glimpse into the future: People view or Projects view?
Do you want to bring in new projects and you need to know what resources are available to take them over? Then People view is your key to the answer. In this window you’ll see people’s availability from a specific department/location or working in a specific project or with selected clients. And it gets even better! You can also check if people with specific skills that you need for the new projects are available. Therefore, this view is not only an indicator for over and under allocated people on current projects to help you redistribute resources when necessary, but also allows you to have a look into the future, see if there are enough resources or you need to hire additional people for new projects; and now you can make a sound forecast for your new clients. Pretty good, isn’t it?
When you are in the Project view, you can see the current projects’ allocation status, whether the budgeted hours are fully allocated or not and make an estimation about projects completion.
Therefore, both views will show you over and under allocations, but from different perspectives. Just bear in mind that choosing People view, for instance, doesn’t mean that, in the same window, you won’t see the projects too; they’re inseparable, it’s just a matter of information layout.