Distributing Work to Staff
Distributing Work to Staff
(OP)
I am a manager of a small staff of engineers and technicians. Part of my responsibilty is to take the projects that we get and assign them to my staff....basically a resource manager of sorts.
What I was wondering - is there any type of simple software out there that isn't too expensive that allows for a quick layout of staff workloads across a calendar?
I'm thinking of some kind of Gant bar chart where individuals may have multiple projects going on at various times, with each project varying in intensity in different weeks?
This would allow a quick review of your staff, who is busy, who is not, and when are they busy or idle? Then I could easily assign new projects, each with their own shedules and intensities to the right people.
What I was wondering - is there any type of simple software out there that isn't too expensive that allows for a quick layout of staff workloads across a calendar?
I'm thinking of some kind of Gant bar chart where individuals may have multiple projects going on at various times, with each project varying in intensity in different weeks?
This would allow a quick review of your staff, who is busy, who is not, and when are they busy or idle? Then I could easily assign new projects, each with their own shedules and intensities to the right people.





RE: Distributing Work to Staff
I use Microsoft Project, but only for my personal projects. I imagine it would be quite easy to expand it to multiple people.
RE: Distributing Work to Staff
We could track each engineers workload in excell and grey out each completed job. We could add and subtract collums to obtain a history on how long each job would take. Once we had a history, it was easier to measure workloads. We could also track hours spent on each job as well.
RE: Distributing Work to Staff
I managed a small group of customer application engineers with multiple ongoing projects all of the time, sometimes in-house, sometimes out-. When the salesmen called up and wanted a project done to close a sale, I could predict very well when it could get done. They loved that because they could predict very well back to their customers when it would get done (and predict to the Sales Manager when they could book a sale). I never needed to do it, but MSProject can track actual-vs-estimated costs, do charts, overtime, etc.
I have seen a couple MSProject clones out there on the net that may suit your purposes for less money.
TygerDawg
RE: Distributing Work to Staff
I have used excell in about 30 different formats for project tracking depending on what Sr. Management wanted. You can even make your own gant charts with Excell using your imagination.
RE: Distributing Work to Staff
RE: Distributing Work to Staff
RE: Distributing Work to Staff