Successful firms are future-oriented. They plan for projects weeks, even months ahead of time. That means allocating future hours and tasks to the right staffers, ensuring that everyone is working at their capacity and distributing workloads evenly.
To do all of this successfully, companies have to have a watertight resource planning strategy. But without the right tools, making that kind of strategy a reality can get messy. Firms that take a low-tech approach to resource planning will need to create multiple reports and run their data side by side to figure out how to allocate hours. That translates to a lot of open tabs, and a lot of valuable time wasted on mental math and manual data analysis.
Anticipating these issues, BigTime developed a feature to help solve the logistical problems of resource planning. That solution is the Planning Board, which gives BigTime users a holistic view of all their staffer’s future allocations. The Planning Board can be accessed by going to WORKFLOW on the main navigation bar and clicking PLANNING BOARD.
Once they’re in the Planning Board window, system administrators (or users with Planning Board permissions) can see all their staffer’s future allocations in a weekly or monthly view. By clicking on staffer names, they can drill down into their allocations for each project. Visual tools like donut charts and color coding give immediate insight into whether staffers are over or under allocated. There are also sorting, grouping and filtering options available so firm leaders can organize their Planning Board data in the way that works best for them.
The Planning Board makes sense out of raw allocation data and paints a clearer picture of the health of your firm’s resource planning strategy. Leveraging it can help your firm stay focused on the future. Now that you know how it can support a robust resource planning approach, take a look at some of the articles below to learn how it actually works.