Improve Resource Scheduling and Bench Management with These OpenAir Features

Managing scheduling, resourcing, and your bench is key to a successful professional services organization, especially during an economic slowdown. You need good processes in place for resource requests, allocation, and management, but your scheduling tool should make your process run seamlessly and allow for automation when possible.

With OpenAir, professional service organizations have the tools to effectively schedule projects and request and assign resources. But OpenAir does even more than that. You can use your PSA to find the right resources based on skills and experience, and even help use slow growth times more efficiently so that, when needed, your team can hit the ground running.

Define Critical Roles

OpenAir project templates can make the process of setting up a project faster and more efficient. Tasks and timelines can be mocked into the template to give your project managers a head start. But to give them even more to work with, and to help identify the critical roles needed for a project, generic resources and job codes can be added as part of project planning.

With generics, a project manager can begin to “rough-in” the resources they will need for project tasks and the time they will be needed. With the addition of job codes, project managers can create a picture of the skills those resources will need.

As the project is customized for the client, project management can embed hours into specific tasks, but a high-level start-and-end date timeline may not provide enough detail to effectively assign resources.

A single task may require multiple resources and at different times. For clarity and better resource utilization, consider adding custom fields that show the time period a specific role will need for the given task. That specificity may even make it easier to get the right team member if available resource levels are low.

Finding and Booking Available Resources

With tasks and timelines created, project managers can begin the search for the right named resource for their project. As with most things in OpenAir, there are several ways to find and book resources.

OpenAir provides an option that, if enabled, creates resource bookings at the click of a button. While the process may seem easier on the front end, though, it relies on heavier, more process-intensive actions to occur to complete the booking. This process, known as booking approvals, will push the request to a submission process, then on to a resource manager for approval. That manager changes out the generic resources for named ones and then approves the booking.

Not every professional services organization needs such a formal process. Alternatively, by taking advantage of customizations in OpenAir, you can create a checkbox and field on the project to indicate a project is ready for bookings. Using a scheduled script, the process can be automated to utilize the task assignments to create the requested bookings. This offers a more streamlined process from project set up to resource request.

Identifying the Right Resources

Once a project’s resource needs are defined, resource managers can start the search for the right team member with the right skills with availability at the right time. Here, too, OpenAir can make the process easier.

One method of identifying the right resource is using a job code search. If you’ve set job codes for your named resources and on your generics, it can be trivial to pull up the availability of specific team members tagged with the same job code as being requested. For instance, if the project needs a business analyst, it’s simple to look for business analysts with availability during the project dates.

Another is the resource planner. The resource planner gives you drag and drop functionality and the ability to custom color-code resource availability, so you can quickly see who is over or under-utilized. Percentage usage is also available, as is the ability to drill down to get more information.

The booking chart is similar to the resource planner in that you can color-code the results and easily see utilization and availability, and so on. The booking chart also lets you see the time period as part of the view, and advanced filtering allows you to filter by department or dates. For more information on using the resource planner, booking chart, and advance filters, check out our webinar, Scheduling Techniques & Bench Management in OpenAir.

Profiles are another feature of OpenAir that can provide a selection of resources at a more granular level. Creating profiles on things like specific technologies, experience levels, locations, and even languages can make finding precisely the right resource for a complex project a simple task.

Advanced resource search extends the usefulness of profiles even more. You can search for generic resources, contractors, hourly cost, and more. This feature will also let you see resources regardless of their availability or current bookings. If you have a specific need and few resources with the right skills, you can still find them and make the appropriate adjustments to projects.

Using OpenAir to Expand Team Skills During Slowdowns

Of course, as you look at the current climate, you may be more concerned about growing your existing teams’ skills while they are benched. OpenAir can help with that, too.

Do you have few people with experience in a specific technology? Perhaps you only have a couple of project managers that are Agile certified. Maybe you have many engineers with PHP knowledge, but few with Swift, Kotlin, or Rust. Leveraging profile views, you can identify gaps in your team’s skills and use downtime to offer training and certifications.

The same strategy can be used to get your resources ramped up to meet the business’s strategic objectives in the future. You may have provided traditional web development services before, but your long-term plan is to retool the business to provide API and integration services and architecture. Profile reports will help you identify who on your team already has that experience and who may need further exposure to be ready for the new company direction.

OpenAir offers a variety of tools, reports, and views to get the right resource onto projects and better distribute work across your teams. If you’re looking for more information on how to use OpenAir’s tools to improve your scheduling and bench management, check out our webinar, Scheduling Techniques & Bench Management in OpenAir. As always, if you have any questions on how to use your OpenAir solution better or more efficiently, we’re here to help.