How To Use Resource Availability In Orangescrum

Running a business efficiently is all about managing resources effectively. And the two such critical resources are – team and time.

Resource planning, allocation, and efficient management involve careful planning, analysis, foresight and ability to account for possible risks in terms of rapidly changing business demands and landscape.

It is of utmost importance to be aware of the available bandwidth of your resources, your pipeline, in-flight projects and what you can take up further. Thus it is necessary you have a dashboard or a tool that can give you this information on a single pane in real time.

You and your team must always have access to critical information about your resources’ utilization, availability, leave and travel plans if any. More so when you have a globally dispersed and ever mobile workforce.

In this article, we’ll show how Orangescrum takes care of all your time and resource management woes with its comprehensive time tracking, resource availability, resource utilization and leave planning features.

Let us understand how they work and help us in real time.

How to use Resource Availability?

On the Resource Availability Calendar, you can see the resources’ or team member’s “Available” and/or “Booked” hours. You can use the quick project and resource dropdowns to focus on your most precious resources and projects.

Create a task, and never forget to define the “Start Date”, “Due Date” and “estimated hours” in it.

Once you click on Save and Exit, the newly created task will reflect on the Resource Availability Calendar with your chosen resource’s availability marked as Booked. You instantly know if the resource is “Available, Booked, Overloaded or on Vacation”.

What happens when the User is Available

If the user is available on the Calendar, then you can assign a task. By default, the maximum working hour for a day is 8 hrs. Any task assignment for more than 8 hours a day will be marked as “Overloaded”.

If a user is assigned for 3 hours then you can see the available hours of that user is 5hrs in the calendar as shown in the screenshot below.

What happens when the user is Booked

If the user is assigned 5 hours, and you want to assign another 4 hrs. for that day, Orangescrum “Resource Not Available” pop-up will let you know that user is unavailable for 4hrs for that day. Either you need to overload that user or need to assign the same to another available user or change the due date to accommodate the 1 hr. to next available day of that assigned user.

If you want to assign 3 hours for that day, then it’s a straight-forward task assignment.

What happens when the user is Overloaded

Overloaded indicates a resource is already booked for more than 8hrs of work for that day, and you’re assigning a task, Orangescrum “Resource Available” feature will let you know that the user is already over booked, so you will have to either – change the start date or the assigned user.

The Resource Availability pop-up promptly notifies you of the originally intended user’s available date and hours along with that of all the other resources who are assigned to this project.

What happens when the user is on Vacation

When you assign a task to a user who is on leave, Orangescrum will let you know that. So that immediately you can change or assign the task to any other available resource. This way your project activities aren’t impacted and the team can step up to help each other leading to increased collaboration and motivation within the team.

Even if you don’t see the availability of resources and want to assign a task, it will show a pop-up with the next available date and time and other resources available during that period if the assigned resource is not available. If you still want to assign the task to your chosen user, click on “Create Anyway” to assign the task. Eventually, the user will be Overloaded.

Benefits of Resource Availability:

• Heightened awareness around task dependencies and their impact
• Increased collaboration and real time status update
• Adequate clarity around project progress leads to team motivation
• Teams are clear about their tasks, their role and expected outcomes

Leave Planning

If a user is on leave or planning to take a few days off, you can update the leave planning in Resource Availability Calendar. So that you’ll get a real time update about the leave plans of your resources.

Over to you:

A real time Resource Availability calendar helps in accurate Resource Allocation & Project Planning. You can quickly know as to how your resources are stacked for the coming months enabling you to take over more projects.

Say Goodbye to your time and resource management woes today!

Sign up NOW to view your Team’s Availability.