resource allocation

UPDATE:

Intervals now includes a resource allocation report. For more details on this feature, please see the following post:
Intervals project management software resource allocation report

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We recently received the following Feature Request:

"I am just fiddling around with Intervals for my first time today. So perhaps this feature exists and I just haven't found it yet. I am curious if there is a way to predict workload. It appears that you can track what's already happened, but can you predict someone's workload for the next few months? For example, I have an employee who only works 21 hours a week. I want to be able to predict out whether if I assign her say these four tasks, I will have gone over her 21 hour a week limit. If this already exists, just let me know. Otherwise it would be mightly helpful."

We are contemplating this feature and we'd love to get thoughts on what others would like to see.

Other project management software often has very laborious and complicated ways of pulling off resource allocation. It can include any of the following:
1. setting up a users maximum weekly hours
2. "resource leveling" - the ability to shuffle due dates based on availability
3. requesting time off
4. not assigning tasks to someone if they are not available or overtaxed with hours

We want to do it in a very simplistic way because this one feature can add a lot of complexity. In it's simplest form we may just add the "maximum weekly hours" to a user, then have a report where you can:

- select the user
- start & end date
- see how much work they are currently assigned

Thoughts?

I'd say set up a Maximum weekly hours. But don't make it a required field. Sometimes I don't even use that kind of management.

This is something I know we would love to have. We have one person in charge of scheduling for all the people in our creative department, and if he could see a projection of work hours, his life would be a lot easier. I believe the primary feature we'd like is to be able to see how many hours worth of tasks have been assigned to each of our artists for the upcoming day/week/month. I'll send him over to look at this thread so he can add any additional thoughts. Thanks for considering this!

Allocating new work according to workload is essential, especially when more than 4 or 5 resources are to be managed effectively. This need not be very complicated - A report or graph showing the estimated time for tasks open and scheduled to start in the time-frame set {(from (date) to (date)} per resource would be a great start. I know you are already working through the hols, so wishing you strength and inspiration to make our lives easier.

I'll add my comments (I've already put in a feature request.

As I begin to work with a number of people, having a way to track available hours would be really great. Perhaps allow for folks to map out the hours of availability in given weeks, and then reporting both on future hours available, as well as reporting previous hours available vs. used, and comparisons with estimates for projects and tasks, etc.

Hi I've just posted to
https://www.myintervals.com/forum/discussion/568/forward-planning-and-development-scheduling
(hope that link will work!!)
Maybe if MyIntervals can not produce some nice feature to do this on screen, some guidelines or data report so that we can do this manually with Access or Excel. If we developed something we would be happy to share with the community.

Regards from London...Rob

I agree with the need for this and that is doesn't have to be complicated to start. It seems that the beta "periscope' report could be one place to start, with being able to see # of hours a resource is allocated for by week. I wouldn't want to set a max hours without being able to see what they are on. I'd prefer to leave the ability to overload them, but the insight to be able to fix that.

I can't stress enough the importance of raising this feature up on your priority list!

For our company this is also the key feature that is missing from Intervals - we use it primarily as a task management tool for web development and not being able to have a quick view showing what people are supposed to be working on, if they have capacity and an overview of project timescales makes life more difficult than it should be ...but then no other web based software at this price point seems to offer this functionality either.

For me, the key place to show this would be on the Home/Calendar. Probably the easiest implementation I can think of is to show a task's entire duration in this view, even if it was replicated on each relevant date rather than stretched across a range of dates (as you'd see in iCal for example). the forward chevrons could be kept but either colour coded to denote 'start date' & 'continues' (or changed so only one was shown to represent a task being 'in progress')

For forward planning, it would be pretty easy to work out if someone was overbooked by looking at the estimates in the detailed view (if you didn't have *too* many tasks in one day) - or maybe some kind of 'utilisation by resource' view could be implemented showing 'name = x/x hours' estimated on each day?

It would also be great to see projects displayed using a more complete view, so a quick overview of what is on across a whole company can be seen - despite having a small team, we often have a large number of projects on the go at the same time, run by many different people and having a one stop place to see this in the Calendar view would be an great benefit.

*edit*

Ah, just saw this...

https://www.myintervals.com/forum/discussion/364/have-actual-start-and-end-times-for-tasks-and-draw-time-line-on-the-calendar/#Item_4

... I should probably check this forum more often. I even posted on that message.

No Gannt style view

:(

Will have to keep on checking. There's a massive gap in the market for an online resource management/workflow tool at a reasonable price point.

OK I am very new to intervals too, so forgive me if I'm missing a trick. I think I also want to forecast in the same way as others have mentioned above. I want to be able to look at a given time period (this week, next week, next month, next October, whatever), and see a list of my tasks relevant to that month, with the time allocated to them and the time actually spent so far (if any).

It seems to me that a simple way of acheiving this would be to be able to filter the list of tasks allocated to me, by date? Could this be done?

We really need something like this. We work on small projects for multiple clients, and many of our resources only have partial availability (20 hours/week). We need the ability to see how much time is allocated/available for each resource so we can assign tasks and plan timelines for new projects. Intervals has worked great for us so far, but we need it to be able to handle the next step in our business development, which is the ability to plan workloads due to growth.

Michael, this is the one thing I emailed you about recently too... I have to say, after investigating about 50 (yes fifty) different tools and add-ons with other systems, I come back to Intervals and it's the most comprehensive yet easy to use solution for a team.

The big issue is traffic management.

Think of the workflow:

Project comes in from the sales guys, the producer (who coordinates who does what in the team) then puts the hours of the estimate in to the project, a few tasks (design, development, testing) also the start and end date of the tasks. At that point she would have allocated the resource to the tasks too.

All seems fine, but then the producer will want to make sure she has not 'over allocated' resource. Or, artwork from the client comes in a day late - need to move a task ahead by a day, but not create a train wreck for the other projects that designer may be assigned to as well.

How does she juggle the design resource she has? look at the calendar view on their home screen and see all the tasks... right now, it's a bit of a mess. She cannot see 'continuity' of tasks (tasks that span days) or who is assigned to any of these tasks without clicking on each one. Even if she does now move tasks around, it's hard to tell if the resource is free because you only see start and end per day.

Take a look at some examples that do get there on resource planning (but kinda suck at everything else):

1. Basecamp - wayyy too simple for managing anything serious, missing so much that Intervals has, but the calendar can show you - as ugly as it may be - who is working on what for any given day.

2. https://plannerhq.com/ planner HQ is KILLER for resource allocation, it's like a dream, only it does NOTHING else. Which kinda sucks. But this one runs all of your resource in a grid by day. Which is novel.

3. Wrike - its Gantt charts are exceptional, it's 'possible' to figure out what resources are doing on any given day - but then it also is so loose that you need to train people on what folders do what so that they don't screw up the universe by dragging and dropping a task to the wrong place. (seriously)

4. Copper Project - actually, this app gets pretty close, but resource allocation still can only happen from the task level so the user experience of managing resources is just way tooo fiddly. But - it does have a visual grid of all the resources by day which is great for a producer.


SO - what would the path of least resistance be to make Intervals handle resource allocation like this?

The calendar HOME screen for sure, since it already does it in a sense.

It would make sense to add more structure to it however - rather than these draggable bunch of start and end markers, make it a grid model that lets you drag tasks along it - horizontal axis should be time which can zoom in and out, and scroll across in some way (pagination or fancy-pants ajax updating scroll) and vertical should be in the format of what you want to see: By Project, By Person, By Client(?), By Milestone(?)

Tasks should visually span days so users know when they start and stop, who is doing them and how long they are allocated to it without 'hovering' or clicking on anything.

Tasks should be able to be dragged horizontally to adjust start date and end date SIMULTANEOUSLY and also have anchors on either edge to 'pull' start or end date

Clicking on a task to edit makes sense in this view, right click to do the usual task shortcuts of changing assignee etc would be even better.

So, hopefully this is more helpful than my last email...let me know if it is, and if you would consider anything like that.

Regards
Joe

We would also welcome a resourcing feature. The only way to know how busy people are is to look at how many tasks are assigned to them - but there's not really a good way to do this. And entering projects into the future without assigning tasks to people doesn't quite do the job -- there would need to be a new type of project -- billable, unbillable, projected (or budgeted or something that makes sense) - and any tasks assigned to someone in a projected project would show up as 'tentative' or something -- then you'd have a way to look at forward resourcing. Of course you'd have to either include another level of 'what to include' in the current suite of reports, or develop reports specifically for resourcing.

+1 here .... not sure if it's part of features for coming soon????
-- if not, would be great to see it being added into the roadmap.

+1 I'd really like to see some sort of resource management implemented.

Much as I am impressed with Intervals and the thought that has gone into it I feel this is an important area and it nearly led to me going with another product instead - except that everything I tried didn't quite fit my needs in other ways, leaving Intervals as the best overall balance.

Mavenlink has an interesting approach to resource management that goes well with how they handle tasks and Gantt chart. You can easily combine automatic and manual allocation of hours across days and weeks and see resource availability. However, they currently don't have seemingly obvious elements in there like the ability to put in holidays or hours that people are actually available/unavailable. Also, not having worked with it in detail, I don't know if their implementation becomes onerous to manage on many tasks or not.

I'm not experienced enough with these things to provide really good practical suggestions, but I'd certainly like to see some fluid way to answer simple questions like 'Can I take on this extra work at X point in time', 'How much additional resource will I need and when' and 'How can I replan this and be confident that it won't cause problems with other work'.