Setup Daily Resource View

CCallahan

I'm new to Smartsheet and migrated from MS Project in which I am also a novice user.

Have everything setup in Smartsheet the way it was in MS Project so good there, however we are missing a key view for scheduling. We need to have the ability to view all our resources (employees, temp workers, etc.) on a day-to-day calendar. Our goal is to easily identify if anyone has a gap in their work schedule. Currently, a custom-made Excel spreadsheet is the best view for this.

We have 5 superintendents running projects. Those superintendents have anywhere from 3 to 10 people working under them. When at a customer facility, they can be working on one project for a long duration or jumping from one small project to the next.

The crew under the superintendents can change weekly, depending on the size of the current projects and what phase we are in. One person could be on a jobsite for two weeks and on another crew after that for 2 months.

I need a way to easily look at everyone's schedule and see any gaps. None of the four views in Smartsheet does this well in my opinion. Could not find any views in MS Project that I liked either. Our Excel sheet is simple and gives us this but is bad at the things Project and Smartsheet are good at.

Is there a way to setup a Dashboard or some other type of view to see this? What about Smartsheet Resource Viewer?

TIA

Colleen Patterson

@CCallahan we use Resource Manager for this exact concern / solution. Love that you can allocate against time against projects, and see any bandwidth gaps or opportunities.

https://www.smartsheet.com/platform/resource-management

Colleen Patterson

Great question! In our project plans, we have tasks assigned to different team members or different team categories. This allows for multiple people to be on a project, but their time to be allocated to specific tasks.

Things like vacations or outages are all tracked within the Resource Manager site, where you can enter details like that, which would allow you to project those concerns in the future and preplan to cover any potential outages.

Colleen Patterson

@CCallahan we use Resource Manager for this exact concern / solution. Love that you can allocate against time against projects, and see any bandwidth gaps or opportunities.

https://www.smartsheet.com/platform/resource-management

CCallahan

@Colleen Patterson Thanks for the reply. I've heard of the Resource Management module but not familiar. It is not included in my plan. Sounds promising so I'll reach out to Smartsheets for a demo and go from there.

Thanks.

CCallahan

@Colleen Patterson One more question please…..

If I have two or more resources allocated to the same project, and only one column to enter allocation %, how do you track these resources individually? What if one person stays on the project 100% of the time but the other takes vacation 2-weeks before the project ends? How do you set it up to see that?

I'm only working in the manager included in the Business package so I may not see everything you are if using the separate RM module. If it can do this, that will be good to know.

Thanks.

Colleen Patterson

Great question! In our project plans, we have tasks assigned to different team members or different team categories. This allows for multiple people to be on a project, but their time to be allocated to specific tasks.

Things like vacations or outages are all tracked within the Resource Manager site, where you can enter details like that, which would allow you to project those concerns in the future and preplan to cover any potential outages.

CCallahan

@Colleen Patterson I was able to get a trial activated for Resource Manager so trying it out. Any idea why none of the resources show up on it besides myself? I've put in multiple people directly on the sheet and none show up in RM. Do I need to add them in a different spot or another way?

TIA

Colleen Patterson

Wonderful news on the trial! There are some great learning tracks that I used when setting up RM for my company. You will need to add your team here as well, and then you would be able to start Syncing your work.

https://help.smartsheet.com/learning-track/getting-started-resource-management

CCallahan

@Colleen Patterson

I had to learn about all the different user types which was and still is confusing. What I learned is only licensed users can be tracked. I was trying to track with people on my contact list which is why they were not showing up.

I find it a bit ridiculous that a user has to be licensed just to be tracked and has no other involvement with the software whatsoever. Not sure why a license is necessary.

Thanks.

Colleen Patterson

My understanding is that the goal is not to track external support but instead to track internal core team members. You would be able to set up the user types to act as placeholders and set their allocation based on the larger team, which I have done for some of our vendors.