Accelo's Team Scheduling has been officially released. Learn about Accelo's Automated Team Scheduling Software
Team Scheduling is Accelo’s powerful new resource and workload management tool, built specifically for those who run a team of professionals - be they designers, developers, consultants, lawyers, accountants, architects or engineers. Like the single user scheduling system - which forecasts how busy someone is if they're going to complete all of their tasks on time and on budget - the Team Scheduling is built off the activities and tasks assigned to each user in Accelo - just with the ability to see many people's schedules at once!
Set client expectations with renewed confidence
We all know that feeling - a client asks when something can be done, and we have to guess and fudge: "I think we can have that done by next week". While the unexpected is always to be expected, you shouldn't be making decisions and promises blind - you need to know what your team is working on if you're going to run a successful business off more than just luck!
With each users’ schedule lined up on the left of the screen, you can quickly get a sense of this current and future utilization - and they're updated instantly if a project slips, someone completes a task or has new work assigned to them. Say goodbye to juggling manual spreadsheets of schedules, and say hello to easy to review color-coded blocks of work.
What separates this new screen from the single user scheduling screen, is the ability to shuffle work between user schedules. By selecting a day for a user, you can drill into the tasks and activities which are filling their day, and easily allocate time to another user - or completely re-assign the task.
This helps you see who's busy, and who's got capacity, and to get ahead of blockages and over-utilization before it becomes a problem.
Primarily, so we can get it into your hands sooner! - We’d love to deliver a perfect polished product, but the truth is we can’t confidently reach that point on our own: Real-world feedback and beta testing will help us know where the fine-tuning is needed, as well as the next important features to add.
Secondly, hundreds of hours of design and coding has already gone into this new screen. Of course we’ve been reviewing the quality of our work and testing it thoroughly, but our customers sometimes have real-world data which we weren’t able to test with, or come across a use-case which we haven’t handled properly. So we just want to assert that it’s not bullet-proof, yet.
You need to be an admin user, and Team Scheduling is only available for the Premium editions of Accelo. To enable it:
The top navigation should update to reveal a new multi-schedule icon. Click this to access Team Scheduling!
By default, the screen will load showing your schedule and the schedule for any users that you manage. To add more users, simply click the "Schedules" drop-down field in the upper left, and search for users by name, or scroll through and select as required.
To see a user's schedule, firstly select the day from the graph view. The right-hand side of the screen will update to reveal the activities and tasks for that day. The work for a user is broken into four different types:
Once you're looking at someone's schedule on the right hand side, you can move work around by clicking, dragging and dropping the item onto any day in the schedule - for any visible users.
When something is re-allocated, you'll be prompted to choose precisely how the re-assignment should occur:
You might have been wondering, “The Team re-scheduling stuff looks cool, but how can I find, assign and schedule new or existing projects?”
The good news is, this is coming just around the corner, but we wanted to give you the ability to reassign work across your team while we finish this piece of the Team Scheduling.
When complete, you'll be able to search/filter for Tasks, Projects, Tickets, Retainers and even Sales via a slim search column on the left of the screen. Then, from a list of tasks and other work, you'll be able to drag work onto user schedules - you'll even be able to do things like drag a milestone without any tasks onto someone's schedule and create a task in an instant.
Another reason for releasing the Team Scheduling as a beta - even though we don't have the ability to see a list of unassigned tasks on the left, for example - is because we'd love to get your feedback, ideas and suggestions. Learn more about the full version of our Automated Team Scheduling feature.
