Teamdeck is the resource management software of choice for hundreds of teams worldwide. We believe that the #1 reason for our tool’s adoption is its ability to be customized. Our customers set personalized views, adjust templates and create integrations that help them manage their teams without any unnecessary hassle.
What will you learn thanks to this article:
- Why do project managers use project resource management tools for the resource management process
- Useful resource management tool features to optimize resource utilization
- Efficient resource management can not work without customizable resource management solutions
Efficient resource management is all about using your time and energy for actions that make a difference for your team and your business. Streamlining your Teamdeck routine will give you some extra time to focus on the essence of your job.
Whether you’re a brand new user of Teamdeck or a seasoned one, you should be able to improve your productivity with these tips for efficient project resource management.
Organize your settings
Teamdeck comes with a variety of options for users to choose from. Flexibility is important since different companies have different needs. On the other hand, however, it is not often the case that a team actually uses, say, all 16 of the predefined vacation reasons.
Team members with owner permissions can change the predefined settings. Go to Settings -> Advanced to start organizing. Take a couple of minutes to browse through the lists of:
- booking tags,
- timesheet tags,
- vacation reasons,
and remove the ones your team is not likely to use. The lists will be shorter and easier to browse for you and your teammates.
Worried that you might eventually need extra tags? You can add them anytime, there’s no need to stack up in advance.
Custom fields for effective resource management
Teamdeck allows you to add custom fields to your team members and projects. This way, you can provide more details about your teams (job title, location, seniority) and your work (client, budget).
The main advantage of having custom fields is the ability to drill down your resources with ease. Need to find a software developer who’s available to join a new project? Instead of going through your team one by one, you can choose to only display people whose job titles match your vacancy and who are available to work in a given period. This feature is especially appreciated by bigger teams and companies with multiple offices, where team members don’t know each other that well.
Custom fields will come in handy when creating reports, too. Imagine that you have to monitor your project’s actual costs, but every employee has a different hourly rate. Having a “project rate” custom field associated with every team member will save you a lot of spreadsheet-browsing time.
Create custom views
In Teamdeck, every user with a manager or owner permissions can set up multiple custom views of the main resource calendar. They can be shared across the organization or kept private.
That’s a game-changer, especially if Teamdeck is used by different teams at the company (PMs, HR, sales), and that’s almost always the case.
The default view of the calendar displays a couple of rows for each team member:
- Bookings
- Timesheets
- Availability
- Vacations
- Bookings/Availability (B/A)
- Timesheets/Availability (T/A)
The default view is very informative but, at the same time, quite extensive, especially if you have a large team. Custom views, on the other hand, can store only the data you need to do your job.
HR teams usually create a separate view just for the vacation data, whereas salespeople, interested in their team’s capacity for new projects, focus on bookings. Such single-purpose views are usually much easier to read.
How to create a custom view? Click on the New view above your resources list. Then, configure the settings and filters of your custom view.
Just like it was the case with the general settings of Teamdeck, the calendar view should be suited to your company’s particular needs. For example, if there are no part-time employees in your team, you can probably do without the availability row. The same goes for timesheets if you choose not to track them.
Build master reports
There are 7 report templates available for you, suitable for calculating utilization or monitoring project budgets. You can customize them to fit your requirements. Once you’ve created a perfect report template (e.g. one for calculating Sales KPIs), share it with your fellow managers. This way, they’ll save a lot of time and a reporting standard at your company will be established.
That approach will make perfect sense for company-wide reports. What about the project-specific ones? As of now, you can’t duplicate existing reports in Teamdeck, so your colleagues cannot copy your report. They can, however, work with the available templates to speed up the process of report creation. Alternatively, you can stick to one report and use filters to display the data one needs to analyze at a given moment. Multiple people can use the same report and only change the date range/project they’re looking at.
Integrate resource management solution with Slack or email
Staying on top of your team’s workload or absences is important for efficient resource management. Fortunately, there are ways to be up-to-date without having to check your team’s calendar every couple of minutes. You can create Slack or email notifications to alert you about important events (e.g. new vacation requests).
The easiest way to do it would be to use Zapier, as it requires no programming skills. If you want to create a custom workflow, Teamdeck’s public API is available for you to play with.
Want to learn more about effective resource management with Teamdeck?
Choosing a powerful online calendar planner is one thing. In order to really benefit from it, however, you usually need to learn tricks that’ll make your work easier. Starting out with Teamdeck is simple but we’re happy to help you become a power user in no time. Book a free consultation with our team to discuss how you can tailor Teamdeck to your needs.
