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Scheduling: A True Balancing Act
 Regardless of your IT Solutions company focus, you have resources that cost you a pretty penny and that are crucial to your company’s profitability. In fact, when you examine your costs, your highest one is likely to be labor expenses. Billable employees are unique in that they drive revenues – and profits – so you want to have just enough of these folks to meet your current and anticipated demand. Once on the payroll, the key leading measure you want to watch is utilization. Scheduling is your primary method of keeping these employees engaged and profitable.
Balanced against this is the client perspective. Whether you are scheduling projects or service tickets, client satisfaction is driven by how well you manage all of your client-facing activities. To the degree you demonstrate professionalism and efficiency, you will build credibility that becomes the basis of a long term loyal relationship. Scheduling is one of the main levers by which you balance both resource utilization and drive client satisfaction.
Scheduling in IT Solutions companies is more of an art than a science. The reason is simple: it is a complex endeavor. Work comes in at a variable rate, the length of time to complete work is variable, different tasks and activities have differing priorities. And these priorities change…constantly. Added to this are differences in skill sets that must be matched to work, scheduling changes, and more.
The good news is that ConnectWise PSA provides some very powerful tools to automate and manage this complex endeavor. Everything from high level tools to allow you to manage across multiple projects or service boards, down to micro tools to manage individual activities. All from central, intuitive, user-friendly screens…and they are even color-coded so you know many things without reading a word. With ConnectWise PSA, your project managers and service managers will go from being grumpy to being the pleasant folks they were when you hired them!
How Do You Know If You Have A Scheduling Problem?
Take a look at the following list of questions. Answering as indicated on several of them may suggest scheduling processes and systems could be improved in your company:
- Can you have multiple service boards with multiple queues within each, yet manage them together?
- Can you manage resources across a portfolio of projects?
- Can you easily see, across all projects or service boards, resource availability based on skills, location or other criteria? Can you load balance your schedule(s), even based on resource criteria, such as skill sets or location?
- Can your scheduler use a calendar view to manage, with color coding or icons for types of activities and status of scheduled items?
- Is your scheduling drag-and-drop, even across multiple boards and projects?
- Can your scheduler easily see utilization in real time, using some kind of color coding for each employee, day, board and project?
- Is the scheduler or project manager automatically notified when a newly scheduled task has been read?
- Can you easily re-assign and make schedule changes on the fly, with automatic notification to all affected resources?
- Can field employees update calendars, project tasks or service tickets from mobile devices, and have these changes flow back up to their respective scheduling boards?
- Can you set billable hours forecasts and run reports to show performance against these goals?
- Can you easily see employee chargeable hours vs. billable hours for today, yesterday, or forecasted for tomorrow?
- Do you know the utilization and effective bill rate for your billable employees over time?
- Do you know your billable and non-billable hours by project at any given moment?
- Do you know your actual project hours against forecasts, at both a team level and project level, by phase or for the entire project?
- Can you give billable employees objective evaluations at performance review time, in terms of average hours worked, tickets or projects completed, utilization rates, profitability, etc.?
ConnectWise PSA Helps You Solve Scheduling Problems
ConnectWise PSA can turn your hectic Grand Central Station into a coolly controlled Central Command! Suddenly, chaos will give way to calm, much to the delight of employees and clients alike. With ConnectWise PSA, you will be able to:
- Assign and re-assign project tasks and service tickets across multiple boards simply by dragging and dropping them.
- Assign from the project or service ticket screens or by using the global calendar view screen.
- Use system tools to prevent scheduling incorrect resources, double booking, scheduling people who are on vacation, and more.
- Monitor utilization in real time from multiple calendar views: today, this week or any span of time.
- Drill down from calendar views to the details of assignments.
- Visually watch service ticket progress through each day through icons that change as statuses change.
- Send emails with one click to resources to obtain status reports, with all detail automatically captured in the email.
- Immediately see classifications of work scheduled through color coding.
- Set up automatic notifications to clients based on ticket status changes.
- Sync two ways with mobile devices, which means your changes automatically flow to field employees and their changes automatically flow back to the schedule.
- Allow service and project team members drive their own high performance by giving each their own individual dashboard views.
- Use management reports to analyze resource utilization by employee, client, group, location or company, so you can quickly focus on areas to improve your utilization rates.
ConnectWise PSA is the easy answer to your scheduling problems.
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ConnectWise PSA: The Total Business Automation Solution for IT Solutions Companies
ConnectWise PSA is a complete suite of modules that automate and integrate every process in your IT business: Find & Win Opportunities; Capture, Plan & Schedule Won Deals; Manage Projects & Services; Track, Approve & Invoice; Analyze & Report; Integrate to Internal & External Applications. ConnectWise PSA is offered both as premise based or hosted (subscription based) solution.
Learn more. See all ConnectWise PSA Product Module Features.
The sole purpose of ConnectWise PSA is to give you transparency into and control over your business, a faster and higher cash flow, more revenues, greater profits and higher levels of client satisfaction.
See How ConnectWise PSA Helps You Solve Other Management Problems.
See How ConnectWise PSA Helps You Solve Your Workflow Problems.
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