Organizations around the world face some common challenges like resource allocation, workload management, or capacity planning. Things got even more complicated when, due to the coronavirus pandemic, many companies had to make a switch to remote work.
This situation is a real test of every company’s toolbox: do you have the right tools (apps, templates, procedures) to manage the work of your team? In many cases, it turns out that the processes they relied on (e.g., storing data about vacation days in an Excel spreadsheet) are not robust enough and require too much effort to manage.
Teamdeck is a tool that helps companies solve project team management issues regarding planning the work, managing the portfolio of projects, and assessing the overall team performance.
We have recently asked our clients to share their stories and let us know about the challenges they no longer face because of Teamdeck. In this blog post, we’ll list some of the typical team management problems that you can solve by implementing our app in your organization.
Companies face different types of project scheduling conflicts. When they are managing multiple projects at once, their schedules may clash. Another common source of conflict is assigning people to projects even though these team members have some time off planned during that period. Yet another problem will occur when your project schedule doesn’t account for the limited (or changing) availability of part-time employees or freelancers.
Making sure you don’t have to work around scheduling conflicts requires you to coordinate projects with people and their availability (usual working hours, planned vacation). It isn’t easy to juggle all these factors when you’re planning the work using spreadsheets or PM software that doesn’t account for people’s availability.
The core of Teamdeck is a resource calendar—the single source of truth regarding your team’s workload and availability. Just by glancing at the bookings, you can tell who can take on more tasks and who is already swamped with duties. You can also see everyone’s planned vacation and exact hours when these team members are available on any given day.
Head to Teamdeck’s resource calendar to see every team member’s booking, timesheets, daily availability, and planned vacations.
Planning new projects and adjusting the existing schedules is way more comfortable when you have access to all pieces of information you need.
Teamdeck has completely transformed the way we schedule work. We now have a clear view of all projects and our capacity for new work.
Sam Menter, Mace & Menter
Defining project scope and creating a Gantt Chart is one thing, but adjusting this schedule to your team’s availability and capacity is a step that can’t be neglected if you want to deliver your project successfully. Teamdeck is great for finding the available people to join your new project team: you can create a high-level plan of your project and manage particular tasks in your preferred project management software.
When it comes to resource allocation, Teamdeck makes it easy to pick the right people for the job. You can filter the list of your employees by different categories (skills, experience, location) to find an optimal group of resources.
Identifying people that can join your project team is very simple with custom categories like job title or experience level.
Assigning these people to your project is also simple: you just need to add a booking to their timeline. Not sure if the project will ultimately be greenlit? You can add tentative bookings as well.
The rough planning is really easily done with Teamdeck. Efficient, simple, straight.
François Vuille, Viscom Engineering AG
Let’s imagine that you’re in the business of developing software. The more apps your team builds, the bigger the profit for the company—you probably should find projects for everyone on your team. At the same time, you have to watch out for the workload, as employees’ happiness will be affected by it. Overworked team members will not be satisfied (nor productive), underutilization is not great either.
You can see that resource planning is a balancing act: you have to take into account the needs of your project, the capacity of your team, and also make sure that the team’s workload is spread fairly. Measuring resource utilization is very helpful, as it gives you a big picture of everyone’s work burden, but it’s difficult to calculate without the right tools.
When you create an account, you get access to a reporting suite that allows you to get in-depth team analytics, including a resource utilization report.
Teamdeck’s reports allow you to compare people’s availability with scheduled work (bookings) and actual workload (timesheets).
You can analyze the utilization of everyone in your company or take a closer look at specific teams or roles.
One of our clients said: By using Teamdeck we now not only know resource availability we can track team utilization and billable vs non-billable hours, which is a good segue to another challenge on our list: tracking time.
There might be many reasons for you to introduce time tracking in your organization, but an important motivation would be to assess how much of your team’s time is spent on billable tasks. Why do you need to analyze that? First off, you may be able to identify non-billable elements of your team’s day-to-day work that could be optimized (many teams waste a lot of time on unproductive meetings). Secondly, it may prompt you to redesign your contracts or even adjust your business model and, as a result, improve the bottom line of your business.
Again, even though you can ask your employees to fill in a paper timesheet or log their hours in an Excel spreadsheet, it’s much more convenient for both sides to use a dedicated app.
With Teamdeck, it’s effortless to tell the billable and non-billable hours apart. Every recorded time entry can have a set of tags signifying its nature (e.g., billable, working from home, approved overtime). Time tracking itself is not bothersome for the employees, as they can use a convenient mobile time tracker.
Teamdeck’s mobile time tracking app will help your employees keep track of their work.
Thanks to the powerful reporting features of Teamdeck, you can calculate precisely how much money your projects have generated in a given period based on the tracked billable hours and your team wages.
It’s simple, clean, easy to use and has a fair price. It’s not overloaded with features that nobody cares about. It’s a product focused on specific needs.
Gabriela, Ameeba Shapes
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