I'm looking for something that will let me show how long a technician is scheduled to work on a project (sometimes 1 day, sometimes a week or two) so that I know when they will be available to start working on a new project. I mainly need this to project resource (staff) backlog & "reality check" our avility to meet new project deadlines. Right now I am going very low-tech, using a paper calendar & highlighters, but that doesn't work very well for adjusting on the fly.

Does anyone have software they use for this sort of thing? (FYI - I've never really used MS Project, but it seems a bit more complicated than what I need)

TIA

I've looked at a few options and ended up just creating something in Google docs (Excel). It's very rudimentary, but it does what i need very quickly. My biggest issue is that a lot of these programs have so many bells and whistles I didn't need.

The other option is to look at Google calendar and use colors for each person.

dam

I would go with Ms project anyways... even if you don't think you will use the advanced features today you may want to start doing some more advanced stuff down the line once you learn the simple stuff. You won't have that option using something simple like excel.

I think Excel would be the best way to go. MS Project is more for scheduling and sequencing activities than scheduling people. It can do what you want, but it will require some setup.

Personally, I would just create a Gantt chart in Excel with a list of activities and personnel. Something like this:



You can use dates instead of the days of the week. I would assign a specific color to each staff member. This way you can get a very good visual of who is assigned to what activity and when. Above, you can tell that staff member a is probably overextended on Wednesday, and staff member c does not have enough to do.

There are lots of other things you could do with a sheet like this, but this is a basic form of what it sounds like you need. Lots of the things you can do in MS Project can be duplicated in Excel with some work, and I'm not sure that it would be worth getting for you if all you intend to do with it is track resources.

take a look at attask.com

try basecamp? The design company we used to remodel our kitchen used it. seemed decent and it looks like it is even better now with apps.

Thanks for the suggestions. So far Basejump looks the most promising to me in terms of feature/cost ratio, but I didn't see anything on their website about managing resources for several projects at once.

I did find Resource Guru, which is ALMOST exactly what I need, but it does have some major drawbacks the biggest one being that I can't schedule multiple resources at the same time, it has to be done one by one which is a HUGE time waster. Looks pretty new & still under development , but if they don't get that fixed by the time my free trial ends, I won't be purchasing it.

The hunt continues...