As part of our ongoing Best Practice Webinar series, last week we featured Resource Utilization with Accelo. In case you missed it or need a recap, you can watch the recording below or read the highlights.
Product expert Katie Priest and host Drew Hansen shared tips and tricks on how you can leverage Accelo to get the most out of your team's schedule, freeing you up to spend less time working in your business, and more time on your business.
"Regardless if you're 2 people or 200 people, there's a challenge around figuring out who is available and the capacity of those individuals when they are available. That is what the Resource Utilization can help you with."
As you expand your team and business, your scheduling and the forecast of your availability naturally gets more complex, too. When talking to clients and closing deals, you need to be able to see which skill-sets will be and won't be available, and at what times to accurately depict to your client a realistic deadline.
To do this effectively, you need a tool that you can rely on to track the availability of your resources. Here are some of the ways Accelo can help you with that:
Team Scheduling: See individual members' schedules and their capacity at this time. You can filter your team's scheduling area by the type of work and skills. View who's available and schedule tasks directly from here.
Resource Utilization - Time: Discover how much each team member is being utilized, and shift work to balance out team's utilization. Ensure your team members have what they need in order to accomplish their goals.
Resource Allocation and Rate: Get an idea of profitability with resource allocation based on rate and potentially even increase your profitability.
Business Forecasting - Schedule Dashboard: Pull up an overview of your future timeline to forecast to your clients when you are available to take on work.
Team Utilization Dashboard: Look both forward and in reverse! Recall how much time you used in the past and how you utilized it, allowing you to analyze your peak times to strategize and replicate successful times. Look in the future for availability and map it to match moments in the past to optimize your company while adding efficiency.
How this Looks in Accelo and How to Access It
At the backbone of Accelo, it's capturing an array of pivotal work in one place, including the Companies, Contacts, Sales, Projects, Tickets, and Retainers, giving users the ability to manage all of this in one place enabling dynamic scheduling and resourcing.
At the start of a project, project managers have to answer the burning question: who is available to work on this project? Luckily, Accelo makes it really easy to know exactly what's going on.
Tracking Bandwidth and Assigning Tasks
Schedule Dashboard (Team Tab)
At the top nav select Dashboard and locate Schedule Dashboard
Resources are on the left, and you can see the bandwidth going into the future. Sort by User, Skill, Group and select a daily or weekly view.
Get a high-level picture of the capacity across the company, with visibility into how busy your team is, what they're working on, upcoming company-wide holidays and staff currently on PTO.
The change in color indicates when someone's being underutilized or reaching full capacity.
Benefits: This tool can be really useful for business managers and owners to look ahead to talk to clients about the timing of taking on new work, or discover hiring opportunities to help meet bandwidth.
Team Scheduling
At the top nav select Schedule and go to Team Scheduling
Under the Projects tab, view all the tasks and milestones on the left. On the right, you can see your team and their availability.
To schedule tasks, click on a specific team member to see their capacity, you can either click on the team member's section to schedule work for them there or drag tasks from the left and drop them over to the team member you'd like to assign.
Choose one of the scheduling options: Commit Time (commit this task for a specific piece of time e.g. three hours), Schedule Time (the task will show up on the assignee's calendar such as Google or Outlook, and schedule a particular block of time e.g. 2 p.m.- 4 p.m.), Re-assign Task (re-assign the task to be done at any point that day).
The meaning behind the colors: yellow (scheduled time), maroon (external events), blue (committed) and purple (auto-schedule work - Accelo takes a long task and auto-schedules, spreads the work over time to complete a task by the designated deadline).
Benefits: The tool enables you to schedule work in a variety of ways to help prioritize tasks and to account for the fact that teams operate in many different ways.
Take a Look at Your Team's Work
Schedule Dashboard (Work Tab)
Go back to Schedule Dashboard and click the Work Tab
Add work via the search bar on the left by locating Project and selecting one of your filters. If you filter by projects due within 30 days, it'll give you a list of all your projects, and you can hone in on the different tasks and users within those projects, and the various work assigned to them.
Benefits: Gives you a solid look at the different work you're doing, how long it typically takes and helps you provide insight to clients.
How Utilized Are We and What Are We Spending Our Time On?
Utilization Dashboard:
At the top nav select Dashboard and locate Utilization Dashboard
Filter by and hone in on Groups, Skills, and customize the date range
See how utilized your team was over the past few weeks, the present, and future.
Find the resources: User, Work Type %, Used Time, Total Utilization, and Specifics
The meaning behind the colors: Logged Time category includes green (billable) & orange (non-billable), and the Estimated Time category (anything that's been assigned but hasn't been completed yet) includes yellow (scheduled), pink (external), blue (committed), and purple (auto-scheduled).
You can even turn off Estimated Time categories if you want to focus solely on billable and non-billable utilization.
Benefits: Get insight into what each team member is working on, what type of work they're handling and how much of that is billable.
Empower Your Own Bandwidth
Task Board:
At the top nav select Task or My Schedule to see your upcoming work
View your tasks, reorganize your schedule to help prioritize, and view your bandwidth to pull in tasks when you have capacity and availability.
Need More Help From an Expert?
Accelo Expert Services:
Offers our clients the right service at the right time in their journey to drive business value and deliver on intended business outcomes.
1) Account Management acts as your partner and advocate, gathering resources to meet your needs
Monthly scheduled calls, semi-annual business reviews, goal mapping and success plans
2) Premium Technical Support is there to lend a helping hand the moment it’s needed
Ongoing technical support in a variety of channels including email, live chat and phone support
3) Configuration Consultations ensure you continue to receive the maximum value from your investment
Short-term, scoped engagements with a Product Expert focused on a specific set of configuration needs, best practices or business optimization consultation.
Expert Services at Accelo provides you with the support needed for each phase of your growth & scale.
