Employee Availability Chart

Need engineers or techs for your project?  There's a chart for that. It's called the Resource Allocation bar chart.  Or Employee Availability, depending on how you look at it.

Projects Need Resources 

"What's the difference between resource allocation and employee availability?"

A resource allocation bar chart shows how many hours employees are scheduled to work.  Flip that over and it's an Employee Availability bar chart.  Either way, you get the idea.  You can see which employees are booked and which are free.  Find the employee of your dreams and assign them to your project. They'll get an email telling them they're on the team.

Watch the video below, and then this resource allocation video.

Focusing on employee availability, not resource allocation

It may be a subtle difference, but knowing when employees are available is usually the end goal. It certainly is for this discussion. Each bar on the Availability graph illustrates how available employees are. The larger the bar, the more available they are. No bar, no availability. Full bar, fully available. Simply choose a person from the dropdown list, and you'll see when they might be ready to work on your project.

Assign employees by skill

Have you ever wanted to search for engineers or other skilled employees by a specified skill. E.g. "Engineer 1" or "Engineer 2" or "Surveyor". It turns out, you can assign skills to every employee. Later, you can search for those skills when assigning people to your project. The image below illustrates assigning by skill. When you take a closer look at that image, you see employee availability for each person found.

Click any availability, and the Resource Allocation window opens. It shows the bar chart for that person. This lets you dig deeper and see the exact projects and tasks that person are already working on. Knowing that can help you decide if this person is correct for your job.

Look below for that window.

The Resource Allocation window also lets you find others that might be free in upcoming weeks or months.

"Dan is not available for three months. Pick someone else."

Doesn't the office manager already know this?

True, in smaller offices, the office manager knows who's working on what. That's her job. But larger organizations, with people contributing to many cross-functional disciplines and projects is a harder job. That is why the window below exists. It shows exactly when the person is free to work. And lets you search in many different ways.

1. You can examine a single employee
2. Or, you can see availability for an entire work-group
3. You can see availability by selected skill
4. You can find people by role, such as project manager or salesperson
5. You can search a specific project only
6. Or limit the search to a folder that contains some projects
7. Or limit it to a portfolio of projects

"I would never have found you without this resource thing"
"Glad you did!"

This article Employee Availability Chart was first seen on http://www.stdtime.com