Apptension – the software house from Poland – saves nearly $10,000 a month, and we use only one tool to achieve that.

But it wasn’t always that easy.

Being a software house that works on multiple projects at a time, we’ve tried out several tools for time tracking and resource scheduling.

At the end of the day, though, we’ve been still a bit disappointed.

Time trackers based on filling out spreadsheets take more time to use and are inaccurate. Fed up with meaningless guess-reports, we’ve decided to build our own tool, and that’s how Teamdeck came to life.

From the get-go, we’ve implemented it internally. It helped us keep up with our projects, both the in-house and remote team members, as well as part timers.

“Booking employees’ availability reaches beyond traditional list of planned holidays and days off. In the times of digital nomads and virtual teams, it is a challenge to manage team members spread across different time zones, working flexible hours” — Zbigniew Czarnecki, CEO at Apptension

We’ve put together this case study to show you a real-life example of how you can benefit from using Teamdeck in your team.

What do we use Teamdeck for?

Wrong allocation of resources and not predicting their availability leads to failure of 26% of the projects.

As we wanted to avoid that, we needed a tool that we can track employees’ time with, schedule their availability, bank holidays, and personal days off.

We wanted to do all of this to avoid downtimes, employee’s underutilization or overworking. In other words, we just wanted to better plan and manage their work.

With Teamdeck, we can do it all.

1. Easy time tracking *

In Teamdeck, we can set hours spent on particular projects manually, or track them with a one-click desktop timer.

As no guesswork is needed here, it gives us more accurate reports and reliable timesheets. We can also compare the estimated time with the actual time spent on a project and use it to better estimate the future tasks.

* It’s been a while since we posted this case study...
A couple of months ago, we launched Teamdeck for Mobile. Our mobile app allows you to extend Teamdeck’s features to your smartphone. You can track your working time, review timesheets and browse the calendar without having to access the web version of Teamdeck. 

Note: Teamdeck for mobile is only available to registered users of Teamdeck. Make sure that you’ve signed up on the desktop before you try the mobile sign-in. 

2. Advanced resource scheduling

Using just one tool we can track employees’ days off, national holidays, and projects bookings. We’re able to monitor team members’ schedules, so it is easier for our project managers to plan team’s allocation and to manage multiple projects.

3. More accurate timelines and budgets

We’ve also included Teamdeck in our sales pipeline, which gave us the possibility to better predict time and available employees while negotiating new deals. The timelines and budgets became more accurate.

How we’ve benefited from Teamdeck

Ok, so as you know what you can use Teamdeck for, let’s see what are the benefits of implementing it in your company.

We have divided this part into the financial gains and the benefits from the project manager’s perspective.

How much money do we save each month?

To calculate the cost of employee management in our company, we’ve asked ourselves three groups of questions, commonly asked by the employees themselves:

1. What I should work on today? / How much time should I spend working on that?
2. Can I take a day off? How many days off have I taken? Was my vacation request approved?
3. How much time have I tracked this month? How much budget have I spent until now? What is the current resources usage?

As we currently employ around 50 people, we’ve used this number and the hourly rate of $30 to calculate, how much money do we waste based on the time we spent answering these questions.

It took a spreadsheet and some basic math to realize that, without Teamdeck, we’ve been wasting $11,130 in employees’ time monthly, to deal with this common managerial struggles.

Teamdeck helped us to reduce this waste to $1,249.50, which saves us $9,880.50 a month.

What’s interesting, 40% our employees spent the most time asking their project manager about the daily assignments. We’ve estimated that it lead to 56 hours wasted every month, which added up to $1,680 we could have spend better.

Is it easier for our PMs to manage the projects?

Yet another advantage of using Teamdeck is that it’s easier for the Project Managers to run the projects, knowing exactly which employee is available at a time, or who will finish their tasks shortly.

First of all, we can set the long-term plans, keeping in mind different days off and bank holidays.

Our project managers are able to create accurate reports and track the budget. They can then use that knowledge to better allocate employees for the future projects, plan the budgets, and create better estimations for our clients, when making new deals.

Reports may be downloaded in PDF files and attached to our sprint reviews, which makes communication between the teams even easier.

Finally, we can easily track when our part-time employees are available.

All this saves our project managers a lot of work, enabling them to manage the teams more efficiently.

Resource management pays off

31% of companies interviewed by the Access Group claimed that low visibility of particular human resources in the organisation is a big challenge they struggle with.

Using a resource scheduling, leave management, and time tracking tool in our company proved extremely beneficial. Not only did it help us save money, but it also allowed us to better plan and manage the ongoing and future projects. This is also important for keeping employees happy, Zbigniew Czarnecki says:

“It is worth to invest time to go over every aspect of resource management. On the one hand, we will avoid making costly mistakes, and on the other hand we will maintain comfort and happiness of our employees.”

Save your company time and money—invest in resource management tool to better track and allocate employees in projects.