Online Calendar Planner – Plan Your Team’s Schedule Better

Teams around the world are facing similar challenges when it comes to planning their schedules. Creating a project plan is difficult on its own, but keeping it up to date and reacting to changes is more complicated. The situation becomes even more demanding when many employees work remotely.

What will you learn from this article:

• How an online calendar planner helps in project management
• How Teamdeck resource management software is used in the online planning
• Differences between an online schedule planner and an online calendar planner

In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at online calendar planners. You’ll see how these apps work and how you can use them for your benefit.

Online calendar planner and its family

Before you will get a pretty nice insight into how an online calendar planner works, you need to know what does market looks like.

First of all, an online calendar planner, calendar planner software, project planning tool, project planning calendar, calendar planning tool, online schedule planner, or resource scheduling software – have the same role. They are to help you organize your and your team’s work. 

Second, always is a need for taking into account project management processes and the diversity of challenges and expectations related to them. When managers are using some kind of project management solution or just an online schedule planner, they pay attention to functions such as: 

• Full team, tasks, and time transparency (our industry uses to communicate it thanks to phrase A bird’s-eye view)
• Customization abilities and customizable reports
• Employees’ time tracking and timesheets management, including supporting invoicing processes
• Easier than before team scheduling and task assigning process
• Ability to manage employees from the different timezones
• Availability or absence management
• Tagging, color-coding, prioritization features
• Leave management system software – because any project has to be on time

The third, an online calendar planner is just a slice of a big family of project management tools. According to Wrike’s article – our competitor in the online calendar planners market – the software for project management proposes 4 types of online calendar planners. 

1. To-do lists

2. Online calendar planners

An online calendar planner, online schedule maker, or online schedule planner – however you name it, what they have in common is a board, tasks, and people assigned to them. 

3. Gantt Charts

A Gantt chart is a chart with two axes. A horizontal one shows a timeline of a project. A vertical one shows all tasks that look like bars.

4. Kanban Boards

A visual board separates tasks/projects into different categories, and each category illustrates the different stages of a project. The most typical setup is “to do,” “in progress” and “complete” supplemented by others.

What is an online calendar planner

Despite the differences, the goal is the same. An online calendar planner or – as we prefer – online schedule planner is a software tool that allows you to plan and add tasks, projects, and events on a calendar view/calendar board. 

Sounds simple, until we use another term – just “calendar planner”. And it should be an impulse that starts a new question: is there any difference? How is a planner different from an online calendar (e.g., Google Calendar)?

These two types of apps have different purposes:

• a calendar allows you to schedule events (e.g., meetings) and serves as a reminder of them,
• an online planner also allows you to schedule events (e.g., add tasks, set reminders, add events, edit events, add notes), but it additionally comes with powerful work planning features. Such features may include availability management, tracking dependencies between tasks, time tracking, and project analytics.

You can say that online calendar tools can also help you to plan your work. And that’s true, at least for personal use. However, when you have to create a schedule for your team (or multiple teams), you will need more features than most calendars offer.

What project managers avoid when using an online calendar planner

Let’s talk about benefits: what are the tangible gains of using online calendar planners? We’ve decided to break them down into a couple of categories:

1. Waste of time & costs 

Have you ever wondered how many hours your team spends on unnecessary back-and-forths regarding their current assignments or upcoming tasks? Apptension, a 50-person software development company has calculated that they used to lose over $11k every month on questions like “what should I work on today?”, “was my vacation request approved?”. With an online calendar planner, they’ve managed to cut this number by almost $10k! 

2. Lack of transparency

When you decide to implement an online planner at your organization/team, it becomes the single source of truth regarding schedules, projects, progress, etc. It’s essential, especially for distributed teams, to have a transparent overview of work happening in a team.

3. Projects under insufficient control

We strongly recommend using online planners instead of planning the work in Excel or on paper. The reason is that, when change happens—and it will almost inevitably happen, you can quickly react and easily edit the plan using an interactive tool. Spreadsheets and text documents can get outdated quickly unless you regularly update them.

4. Rough collaboration

Imagine that your company runs several projects at a time. Each project manager needs to assemble a team and schedule a project around their availability. With a calendar planner, they can also see what other PMs are planning and avoid project scheduling conflicts.

5. Overutilization, underutilization

Project and resource planning apps are tools for building a happy team. Employees want to be in the know as to what their upcoming assignments are. They also feel better when managers can see and plan around their availability or workload. Chances for overtime or underutilization are much lower when you use a robust online planner. Read how to measure resource utilization and its role in project management processes. 

How to plan your team’s work with Teamdeck and its online calendar planner?

Now that you know the main advantages of planning work with online calendar tools, we want to show you how you can do it in practice, using Teamdeck.

Teamdeck is a online calendar planner (or – resource management software, if you will) that combines the functionalities of an online calendar planner with other powerful features such as time tracking, absence management, and project reporting.

Here’s how planning the week for your team can be easier with Teamdeck:

1. See who’s available and who’s busy

Before you start building your week plan, you need to get an overview of your team’s availability. It’s simple: all you need to do is check out the resource calendar.

Here, you can keep track of your team’s availability on two different levels:

• daily availability/working hours (it’s especially useful if you’re working with part-time employees and freelancers),
• planned vacations and different types of time off (e.g., maternity leave).

You can also check people’s current assignments and see if they’re assigned to any projects and for how long. When people already have many tasks on their plates, you might want not to overwhelm them with more work.

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