Since we launched PlanRight in February, we’ve had over 100 businesses try it out. And if we’ve learned anything about planning, it’s that every business plans differently!

One of our goals with PlanRight is to provide visibility into scheduling without prescribing how businesses should plan.

A lot of people use Excel or a whiteboard so they can see the schedule layout and where the gaps are. Because of this, PlanRight provides an almost blank canvas allowing people to schedule work and staff as they see best.

Customer feedback has led to the development of a couple of new features, with several more in the pipeline.

New Features

Team Planning

Working with teams is an obvious way to scale your business and ensure people continue to provide great service while the company grows.

Teams are usually created based on the type of work being done, the geography or the project. And they’re generally made up of multiple roles, so you end up with a matrix of ‘team’ and ‘role’. Planning then needs to take place for the team, or across the roles, or for a location.

The flexibility of PlanRight allows people to create groups (such as ‘Team’, ‘Location’ and ‘Role’) and assign staff to them. It then filters schedules by any combination of these groups.

It helps with questions like:

• What developers do I have available?
• What are my project managers in Auckland working on?
• Which of my design teams have the most capacity this month?
• When can project team X get this new job done?

Daily Planning

The existing PlanRight weekly planner allows people to organise daily chunks of work, up to 6 weeks in advance. This is particularly helpful in a scenario like this (see below):

• Helen has two projects on this week — both of which need 20 hours of her time. It’s up to Helen to organise her timing to complete them.
• Josh is working on one project for three weeks. But needs to be available to a different customer on Wednesday and Thursday.
• Lance needs to finish testing one project before moving on to the next.

But what if Josh and Lance both need to be available for the customer from 8am to 12pm on Wednesday and Thursday? We can simply click on the daily planner (e.g ‘W10’ shown above) and drill into the hourly planner to schedule the work in more detail.

Coming soon

Work Summary

This will enable a staff member (or team) to see a summary of the work they have on — including the estimated effort and completed effort (based on timesheets). This will give a more linear view of the work for people who find it easier to consume information in a table (rather than a schedule).

Other planned enhancements include:

• Customising the schedule display. For example : Job + Task or Client + Job or Client + Task.
• Staying logged into the browser
• Viewing a list of jobs that need to be scheduled.

A big thanks to everyone for their valuable feedback and insights. Keep up the good planning!

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