Resource Calendar – Manage Your Whole Team in 1 Tool
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Resource calendar (or project management calendar, or project planning calendar, resource planning software) allows you to plan and manage and allocate resources more effectively and efficiently – especially if Microsoft Excel had a leading role in your company.
Often a part of a resource management tool, a resource calendar is your go-to view while planning projects, assigning bookings, and managing your teams. What follows is a resource calendar breakdown to give you a glimpse of essential features and why it’s worth using such a calendar in your daily work as a project manager.
A resource calendar (also known here and there as a project management calendar and project planning calendar) monitors the multitude of tasks, occurrences, and dates that takes or will take place during the project’s life cycle.
It observes the individual employee’s – at least – availability, capacity, workload, and utilization.
(Teamdeck)
A resource calendar – as terms suggest – is a calendar for controlling, coordinating, and monitoring resources, including both employees and equipment. It gives project managers a fully transparent view of the entire team and all projects, which is a great way to help enterprises in scaling their businesses.
To be more strict, an overview of how resources (employees) are being utilized, which resources with particular skills are available, how long separated projects take time, and how many particular projects will cost. It also helps with avoiding workload management challenges such as overutilization or underutilization.
What are the project managers’ features looking for in the resource calendar?
Availability / Leave management features – the amount of time for which you can book an employee
Customizable, easy-to-understand reports
Planned work – the time for which an employee is assigned to a project. Ideally, overall bookings for one person shouldn’t exceed their availability
Timesheets and employee time tracking– the time an employee has worked on a given assignment/project. Ideally, time entries shouldn’t exceed the bookings
Employee utilization analysis features
Workload management and its optimization
Project budgeting
Project controlling and planning
Integration’s ability
Advanced customizations
Team members’ bookings, timesheets, vacations overview
Leaves of absence – employee vacations, sick leaves, and other types of absences should be included in employees’ multiple calendars, so you can easily spot the time when a given team member is unavailable.
National holidays – similarly to leaves of absence, national holidays should be marked in your resource calendar as the time when resources are unavailable, so you can’t count them when planning a project.
[Screen from Teamdeck – the resource and project management calendar]
How does a resource calendar benefit your complex projects?
Project managers can benefit from using a resource calendar in many ways, e.g. by:
having a high-level overview of resource availability,
having a better understanding of the company’s production pipeline,
being able to plan resources more thoughtfully,
being able to adjust the team’s workload in case of underutilization or overutilization.
With a resource calendar, you can plan your team’s work more efficiently. By minding employees’ availability, their planned vacations, and national holidays, you reduce the risk of having too little workforce to complete the project.
Similarly, you can use a resource calendar to spot employees you need that are at the moment booked for another project. Knowing for how long they are unavailable, you can adjust your project’s timeline or negotiate with another PM over the resources you both need.
Another advantage of a resource calendar is a clear overview of employees’ workload. By monitoring bookings or time entries, you can quickly spot team members with too much or too little to do, so you can adjust their bookings accordingly.
The resource calendar, time tracking, timesheets, project planning, and workload management in the 1 place?
Let’s make the introduction. The Teamdeck is a SaaS resource management solution developed by a software house that works with NetFlix, Uber, or Universal. Previously the software was dedicated for their own purposes but after dozens of months, the product became commercialized. This is how – generally speaking – this resource calendar became part of the huge project management software market.
It helps each project manager and team member during the entire project, with resource planning, managing, and measuring performance.
Teamdeck, you have access to your employees’ workload with a simple resources scheduler. The information available in Teamdeck include Bookings, Timesheets, Availability, and Vacations.
Additionally, we’ve included two more details that can help you with monitoring the workload:
Bookings vs Availability
Timesheets vs Availability
The bars show employees’ bookings or timesheets compared to their availability. It’s a quick and easy way to see if a team member is being under- or overutilized, making it easier for you to take action.
Availability bars in Teamdeck’s project planning calendar
To make Teamdeck more convenient to use, you can customize the view by selecting which rows you want to see.
Additionally, you can filter the view to display a specified list of employees, e.g. frontend developers or designers only. You can create your own views, so you can quickly get an overview of different teams.
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