Staff Planner is a fully featured and fully integrated staff resourcing tool (or crew planning tool) that lets you view and plan your staff over any given time period.

Staff Planner lets you manage the following events for your staff:

• Bookings
• Activities
• Tasks
• Non-work

Bookings

Bookings are reservations of staff for current or upcoming projects.  They enable you to "pencil in" or schedule staff so that you can make a staff plan for your company for the current period or future period.  Bookings are associated with projects.  Bookings are typically made in the early planning stages of a project and are a step before assigning staff to tasks.

Example: John has been booked to do 3 months animation work for an upcoming project starting in November.  The company does not yet know the exact tasks John will be required to do.  They just know they will need his skills and experience for this period. 

Activities

Activities are work events that are not directly involved in projects.  You need to track these non-project activities so you can make sure there are no scheduling conflicts when booking staff onto projects or assigning staff to tasks.

Example: John is attending a conference for a week in New York.  This is not directly related to a project, so is considered a work activity. 

Example: Sally is attending a training course for 2 weeks in July.  This is not directly related to a project, so is considered a work activity.

Example: Kelly is travelling and meeting potential new clients for 4 weeks in December.  This is not directly related to a project, so is considered a work activity.  

Tasks

A task is a work item in a project with a specific purpose within a defined period of time or by a deadline.  Tasks are related to a larger goal and belong to projects.  Tasks have a name, description, a start date, end date and duration.

Example: You want to build a house.  That's a big, complex project with many work items to complete.  So you would will want to break this project down into smaller work items (or tasks) so that you can manage this complex job.  You may have tasks such as "Make house foundation", "Build house frame", "Lay bricks", "Put on roof", "Install windows", "Add doors", "Install locks", etc. 

Non-Work

Non-work exceptions (or sometimes called non-work events) in Projectal are used when your staff are not available for work.  Typically, this means they may be taking a vacation or have personal commitments or family commitments.  These are important to know about since you need to know when your staff are not available to work on projects or tasks.

Example: Andrew is having two weeks holiday in Spain in November.

Example: Fiona is having a baby and will be taking 6 months maternity leave starting in March.

Example: Oscar needs to have an urgent medical procedure and is unavailable next week.

Grouping

You can group your staff so that you can easily identify them and see metrics for these groupings.  Group your staff using the following criteria:

• Company
• Location
• Status
• Project
• Department
• Skill

Example: Turn on Department grouping so all your staff are listed in their departments and you can see the load on your departments.

Usage Metrics

Staff Planner lets you view different sets of metrics for your companies, departments, locations, projects ans skills.  Metrics include:

• Fixed cost (Gross & Net)
  
• Estimated Cost (Gross & Net)
• Actual Cost (Gross & Net)
• Fixed Duration (Days & Hours)
• Estimated Duration (Days & Hours)
• Actual Duration (Days & Hours)
• Load Utilization (Percentage)
• Load Availability (Percentage)
• Head Count Requirements (FTE - Full Time Equivalent)
• Head Count Availability (FTE - Full Time Equivalent)

Example: Turn on Usage and Percentage to see the percentage load across your projects, departments and locations. Then, turn on Head Count to see the exact number of staff from each department required for the next 6 months.

Filtering & Quick Search

Staff Planner lets you filter the list of staff so you only see the staff that you wish to manage & plan for.  You can filter by booking, project, department, location skill and more.  

You can also search for staff using text searches to find any staff that match the text.  Text searches will search for matches in many fields - including name, position, department, location, company and skill.

Example: Add a filter to just view staff from your Animation department.  Then do a quick search for "London" to just see the UK team.  

Coloring

Add colors to bookings, activities, tasks and staff to easily identify your projects, departments and more in the Staff Planner. 

Saving & Recalling Views

Create and save your favorite views in the Staff Planner and recall them at anytime.  You can share them with other Projectal users.

Example: Save a user view that lists only the freelancers.  Or, save a user view that lists the department head count requirements for the next 6 months.  Or save a user view that lists the team from the Vancouver office and groups them by department.

Import & Export

You can import bookings, activities, tasks and non-work from an external spreadsheet for quick addition into the Staff Planner.

You can export all of the data that you see in Staff Planner to an Excel spreadsheet so that you can use this data in other applications.