What I want to do: My agency has many multi-month projects we manage. At the beginning of a project, I identify the following:
1. The number of hours needed by skill set
2. Which months I need subsets of those hours to take place (e.g. 20 hours of writing in July, 40 hours of writing in August, 50 hours of analysis in August)
I want a tool that maintains all of our project resources and their monthly availability so that when I start a new project, I can input #1 and #2 above and have it tell me who has availability for this project.
I want to be able to take that list of available resources for each part of the project and take it into management meetings where we can resolve which resources to assign, as we reconcile needs across projects.
I want to be able to compare planned vs actual hours by pulling in timesheet data from another system (it can be a manual CSV upload if necessary). We really can’t use timesheet software other than the one we’re already using, which is proprietary.
I want to make sure people aren’t burned out and that work is assigned fairly across people, so a data visualization showing workloads is important. This is a cross-project optimization problem.
I also want a setting where I can set people’s utilization targets. If resource X only spends 50% of their daily time on project work, I want the tool to be aware of this. (Nice-to-have, not must-have)
The tool MUST be user-friendly because managers across the organization will need to use it.
Finally, here’s what I don’t need:
1. Time tracking (though it would be nice if we could upload actual timesheet data from another system)
2. Day or week granularity (we only look at projects on a monthly basis for resourcing)
3. Invoicing
4. Dependencies
My needs seem relatively simple compared to the complexity of what the solutions out there cost. The closest tool I could find wanted to charge us a $50k setup fee, and this seems absurd for what we are trying to do, and we’d have to go through a formal procurement process for anything above $10k.
Is there something out there that will do this simply, and well, without costing a fortune? Am I better off creating a spreadsheet? Saving Changes...
