Unit9 – An Award-Winning Innovation Production Studio [Interview]
UNIT9 is a production studio focused on VR, Digital, Gaming, Innovation and Film projects. We have offices in London, NY, LA, Berlin and Florence.
Find out how a 40-person software development company ditched spreadsheets in favor of a robust resource planning app.
About Softwarepark
Softwarepark is a software development company specialized in building individual software and solutions for data science projects. Currently, they employ 40 people spread over Europe.
The challenge
Being a dynamic distributed company, Softwarepark needed an effective way to plan projects with resources in mind.
- How many hours can we spend on each project?
- Which people will work for how many hours on each project?
- How do estimated project hours and actual project hours compare?
—these are the questions that all project-based software companies ask to keep their projects profitable and maintain a healthy workload for their team members.
I guess every company of our size has this problem. The real challenge is to plan the project to have enough but not too much manpower on them. – Gottfried Reither, IT Project Manager at Softwarepark
Softwarepark decided to give Teamdeck a try hoping that our resource management app can help them get these insights without too much hassle. Before signing up, they’d been using spreadsheets which did their job but were very time-consuming to manage.
Resource planning app with a flexible pricing model
When comparing different resource management tools available on the market, Teamdeck stood out because of its pricing model.
Overall, the pricing of Teamdeck is really straightforward: you always get all of the features and pay only for the number of seats you need.
What makes it different from other solutions is that you can purchase seats for your team members ($3.99 / Full Member / month) and pay a lower price ($1/month) for the so-called Light Members—resources that don’t log into the app by themselves. You can use this option for non-human resources like pieces of equipment. Alternatively, Light Members can be people that simply won’t need to use the app themselves. Instead, a project manager will oversee their availability and workload.
Head to Teamdeck’s pricing page to calculate how much it would cost you to boost your team’s resource management efforts.
Effortless resource scheduling
One of the first things Softwarepark noticed about Teamdeck when they started using the tool is the app’s UI/UX design. We’ve designed it to enable PMs or team leaders to easily plan people’s work for the following weeks or months. Everything you need to know—scheduled bookings, planned vacations, utilization rate—is visible at a glance in a company-wide resource calendar.
Of course, plans change frequently, and software development companies need to be ready for that. With a central resource calendar, you can easily adjust projects’ schedules, reallocate team members, or add extra resources.
Actionable project reports for data-driven resource management
Planning your team’s projects is one thing, but you should also monitor how these plans work out in real life. Gottfried from Softwarepark admits that the project reporting feature is his favorite part of Teamdeck. It allows him to set up a report and regularly compare estimated hours with tracked hours. Consequently, they can balance workforce and costs—and make sure projects are profitable!
Teamdeck’s reports make it possible to make informative charts like this one:
As well as tables with advanced formulas to track your organization’s KPIs:
Traditional project reports are notoriously time-consuming to create and update. With Teamdeck, you set it up once, and it updates every time there’s new data in the app, for instance, new time entries recorded by your team. Therefore, you can share the report with the project’s stakeholders at the beginning of the project, and they will always have access to precise and up-to-date insights.
Plan and manage your team’s work without hassle!
If you face similar challenges as Softwarepark used to, then you might want to give Teamdeck a try. Sign up for free here, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us with questions. We will help you onboard your team and suggest ways to utilize our app to meet your business goals.
Do you prefer to start with a personalized product demo? Schedule it here.
