Track Real Time Project Schedule Updates

If you fully scheduling resources on a project up front, rather than on a weekly or daily basis youll have better insight into your team’s availability. And your team knows what’s ahead.

Things change daily, however, which means adjusting the Schedule daily. But when projects are fully staffed ahead of time, changes can be more precise. 

Scheduling a project fully upfront provided real-time insight into the profitability of the project. Before a project starts, a fully scheduled project should be exactly up to the budget, so you’re mapping the work plan for the project to the actual fee you’ve estimated.

For example, if there’s a $96,000 budget and you schedule two people for two months, full-time at $150/h, the future scheduled amount should match the budget.

Now, as your team reports their hours, you can immediately see the impact on the forecasted budget.

You might not know who is going to work on the project. But if you know either the discipline or department that will do the work, you can create a Placeholder Team Member for that discipline (for example, Visual Designer). This placeholder team member can have a bill rate so you know the impact on the schedule.

When you identify the right person for this project, you can assign the project to that person. And if you make scheduling decisions on a weekly or daily basis, you can split the Placeholder’s assignment, reassigning each segment to another person on the team.