Get Your Free Estimate Template Download for Technical Support

Free estimate template download for Technical Support

hi this is adrian from technical project manager if you are a team leader manager or a resource coordinator of any kind then one of your key responsibilities is to do the resource planning to make sure that your team members are providing the needed support for the ongoing projects and of course you have to make sure that nobody is getting too much work so how do you manage your how do you manage the resource planning if your organization is using some sort of resource management tool capacity planning tool then you are well off however if your company is not using any kind of planning app then how can you do the resource planning the obvious choice for most people then is excel and you can do your resource planning in excel but you'll quickly notice that doing the planning in excel is very manual and it requires a lot of effort and whenever you make a change you add a new column you add a new team number you have just the formulas the formatting etc it's it's a real pain in the neck and you end up spending more time on fixing your excel sheet then actually leading your team which is your main responsibility so for a long time i didn't have a good solution either and i always got questions from my followers asking me whether i would have some sort of resource planning template but i had nothing i could give to them so that's why last year i hired a developer to build a good resource planning solution for me on the basis of excel i think excel is a great tool but you still need some automation to be efficient so in this video i'm gonna give you a demo of my excel solution and we'll just play around with some sample data all right let's open the planner first you have to enable macros because the planner is based on excel macros now the first thing you'll see is the help tab which contains the instructions that show you exactly how to use the planner and you can see it's very simple when you look at the available tabs you'll notice that there's no actual planning sheet so where's the planning sheet well the way the planner works is that you first generate a customized planning sheet for your team with your team members with their working hours the projects they're working on the calendar you wanna use etc and now i'm gonna show you exactly what you need to do in the left most section columns a and b you enter your team members and their standard working hours they're working 40 hours a week 20 hours a week 35 hours per week that's what you specify here in the next section column d you're listing all the tasks and projects your team members are currently working on or what they are going to be working on in the future and you also want to add a general task called admin and meetings or something like that because usually your team members are going to spend a few hours every week in meetings or doing admin stuff the next section is called assignments and here you define what projects or tasks each team member is going to be working on who is going to do what now there are just a few more inputs that we need to make before we can generate the planning sheet the first field is called monday of week one here you specify on what day your timeline should start the next field is the number of weeks you want to show so 52 if you want to plan for an entire year the country indicator is important because the planner will consider the national holidays of your country and finally there's a field called fte per month and the value to enter here are the average monthly working hours that represent a full-time equivalent a full-time resource and this information you can get from your hr department 172 hours per month that's the standard for an employee working 40 hours per week but if let's say in your company you're only working 35 hours per week then you just enter the corresponding number of average monthly working hours in here now we are ready to generate the planning sheet and don't worry you can always add new team members or new tasks later on directly in the planning sheet now let's click the generate planning sheet button it takes a few seconds for the macro to generate the planning sheet voila this is the planning sheet at the top you can see the timeline with the months and weeks and your team members with the projects they are going to work on at the top you can see four buttons and you use these buttons to add further team members change project assignments or extend the timeline the buttons are essentially automating the processes so for example when you add a new team member it will automatically adjust the formatting and the sheet layout to make sure that your data and your sheet is always consistent now let's enter some data we have our team members and now we want to plan the team capacities for the coming months the first team member is me let's assume i'm going to spend about five hours a week in meetings or doing admin work that's probably a bit on the higher end but that's just an example furthermore i'll be supporting an erp implementation project and in january until the first week of february i will probably spend about 25 hours working on that project and then i'm going to reduce my contribution to about 10 hours a week finally there's also a windows upgrade project that i'll be supporting so let's key in the numbers here now one thing you'll notice the total weekly hours appear in different colors why is that the colors indicate whether we are below at or above the available capacity red means we have exceeded the available capacity we have given that specific team member too much work green means we still have some available capacity and wide means we are just on point now in week 4 you see that my total capacity is 40 hours which are my standard working hours why is it still red simple in that week we have a national holiday so i'm not gonna work 40 hours in that week and there's a separate sheet where you can maintain the national holidays and non-working periods for your country it's already pre-filled with the us and uk holidays now suppose you want to give one of your team members another project how do you do that let's take the following example you can see our team member frank howard is working on several projects and in february in march he's already working at more than one hundred percent of his capacity so we want our team member peter norton to take over some of frank's work so let's put peter naught also onto the plant relocation project to assign peter norton another project we just put the cursor onto the total cell for peter and press the green button add task for team member the planner will automatically create a new row for peter where we can add the new project and then we just enter the plan capacities for peter and reduce frank's workload in february and march alright are you still with me one more thing i want to show you is how easy it is to add a new team member you just press the blue button add new team member enter the name of your team member then you will be asked how many tasks you want to give that person and finally you enter the team member's capacity in hours per week press ok and [Music] and now we just assign the relevant projects super simple the last feature i want to show you is the extension of the timeline suppose you want to add another week or another month at the end of your timeline you just press the yellow button add new column and this will extend the timeline by another week so i'm just pressing it four times and it will add automatically the next month which in this case will be january 2022 you see all this happened automatically the layout is consistent it has been formatted correctly you don't have to do any manual corrections it is all done automatically for you and that is why people love the team planner and it is used by thousands of teams across the world check out the link below the video this is the page where you can read more about the planner and its features and is also where you can buy it from i do charge a bit for it because i have invested quite a bit of money into the development work but for the value you get and the time it saves you it's a really good deal to use the planner you need microsoft excel in a desktop version either windows or mac please note that the planner does not work with google sheets that's it thank you for watching this video and if you have any questions about the planner just leave a comment below the video [Music]