Our new GelaSkins have arrived!

1. Click on ‘Resources’.
2. Click on the resource you want to remove from the calendar.
3. Expand “Other Details” and untick “Bookable”.
4. Click “Update” to save your changes.

This makes the resource “non-bookable” and removes them from the calendar. It also prevents them from appearing on the Dashboard or in Reports. But, they will still be able to log in and make bookings.

We contacted a few voiceover companies and, while some of them looked great, their royalty fees were not exactly small. Also, things were often complicated – for example the artist not being available at the time you want to do the recording.

Eventually, I found Voices.com which is amazing! It’s got hundreds of voiceover artists and they all have their own equipment and studios – ready to record at the drop of a hat. I’ve put together a little screencast to show how it works and I hope this helps you with your video project.

Update

Our video has been completed since I wrote this post and here is the final version!

So, when we heard that MUTV are using Resource Guru to coordinate their entire student-run TV station at the University of Missouri-Columbia, we knew we’d made a good decision. Mark Johnson, Student Media Coordinator, told us “a new HD studio, 9 HD cameras, and all the additional equipment needed to produce student-run TV at the college level, requires quite a bit of organization and Resource Guru has been a hit! All of our 150+ students associated with 5 main shows (produced weekly) use Resource Guru to sign-up for camera use, check-out the studio for production and track each other for motivation.”

The executive staff at MUTV

Mark went on to say “each show has its own account and an executive staff member who monitors the checking out of cameras. It’s been infinitely easier allowing students to check out cameras on the web, so that when they arrive at the studio, they know exactly what camera to use and how long they can use it. The days of showing up and hoping equipment is available for use are GONE. Additionally, being able to show all of the hard work that is being done at the station through the use of the Resource Guru reports definitely helps whenever we have to discuss station budget and whether or not the new resources are worthwhile. We couldn’t think of a better way to organize our inventory and shows – thanks Resource Guru!”

We’re far from finished with this functionality and we still have a couple of related features on our to do list. Firstly, we plan to add the ability to link resources together so they can be booked as a group. For example, if you’re booking a camera, it may have an associated microphone and battery that needs to be booked at the same time. Secondly, we plan to introduce custom resource types that allow you to define your own resource templates with custom form fields. So, watch this space.

MUTV – we salute you … Rock On!

Thankfully, the answer to all these questions is YES! It’s a great feeling when you see customers progress from a free trial onto a paid plan. But it’s even better when you hear some of the amazing things they have to say. Here are a few of the comments we’ve received recently.

Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to show us some love – we really appreciate it.

Every now and then, we will randomly send someone a cake – it could be a customer, a supplier or even someone picked completely at random. So, I would like to announce that the recipients of our first Random Act of Cake is Platform45 – the developers who have helped transform Resource Guru from a bunch of designs and prototypes into a fully functional, kick-ass web app!

This masterpiece was created by a fantastic bakery in Cape Town called Charly’s. That’s all I was going to say about our first Random Act of Cake but I have to just quickly say something about the companies we’ve been working with in Cape Town – Platform45, Charly’s and eBooze (a drinks delivery service) – they have all been amazing. The thing that really strikes you about working with South Africans is their enthusiasm and can-do attitude. It’s really been a pleasure. Full disclosure – I was born in South Africa, and miss it like crazy, but I am a Londoner now and can tell you that there is a very special spirit there and they are great people to do business with. To get some idea of the wonderful businesses you can find in Cape Town, watch this video about Charly’s.

Stay tuned for our next Random Act of Cake …

Late breaking news …

A photo taken at Platform45 – we threw in a few bottles of champagne this time. Well, it is Friday after all!

Resource settings

You may have noticed some changes in the settings. There is now a section for you to edit your personal information and another one where, with the right permissions, you can define some general settings for resources.

Setting default availability

On the first tab you will see you can edit the default availability of a given resource. We’ve never really said much about setting a resource’s availability before so we’ve written a separate post about it.

Flexible forms allow you to customise your resource types

The next tab is ‘Custom Form Fields’. This is where things start to get really tasty. Here you can create a custom form field eg ‘Skills’, choose whether or not it’s mandatory and then select which resources you want this field to belong to. Then all you need to do is add the chosen skills you want users to be able to select from, eg Copywriting, Photoshop, HTML etc. All custom form fields are multi-select which gives users the ability to choose one or more options from the drop down.

There’s more! Not only do these fields appear when you add a new resource but adding new options on the fly is simple. Just select ‘New Option …’ in the dropdown and your new option is instantly added to the list.

Filter your bookings any way you like

Until now, if you were using Resource Guru to schedule resources for anything other than a small team, it was difficult to focus on specific types of resource in the ‘Bookings’ section. The new ‘Filters’ feature solves this problem.

In the filters panel, you will see a filter for each resource type. Each filter has a drop down menu allowing you to filter the resources by the options from your custom fields. Let’s say you have two different custom fields – one for ‘Location’ and another for ‘Skill’. Now you want to look at employees based in New York who have both HTML and CSS skills. All you do is select those three items from the ‘Person’ filter and your resource list will be filtered accordingly.

This feature serves two purposes. You may be wanting to view resources by department or location for a weekly standup in which case you simply select that department. It also acts like a search tool – you may not know who can do HTML and CSS in the New York office, but you soon will. We think this adds a lot of new power and flexibility to Resource Guru.

Although Resource Guru was designed for multiple users to have their own booking dashboards, it seems that lots of you still like to get together now and then and go through the bookings by department. This should now prove a lot easier :)

What’s next for filters?

Filters are in their fledgling state. We appreciate that you will want to filter by project and client as well as use filters on some of the other screens like ‘Reports’ and ‘Resources’. Rest assured that this is on our roadmap and Resource Guru will continue to get better and better as time goes by.

In a typical company, very few resources are available for equal amounts of time. Inanimate things, like meeting rooms or equipment are generally available 24/7 whereas people typically work Monday to Friday 9am to 6pm with a 1 hour lunch break. There will also be the part-time employees who only work mornings or those who only work a 4 day week. If you’re going to have a resource scheduling system that actually works, it’s very important that these anomalies are taken into account. If not, you might book someone at a time when they are not actually available. Discovering this fact at the last minute when the work is due to start is not much fun.

Setting a resource’s availability is simple. Just click on the resources card in the ‘Resources’ section and you will see a tab labelled ‘Normal Availability’ where you can set the times they are available on each day. You can add or remove lunch breaks, increase the working day or redefine them altogether.

Setting a default for your resources’ availability

When you open a new account with Resource Guru, your different resource types already have defaults. Non-human resources like meeting rooms are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week whereas people are available 8 hours a day (9 am to 1pm and then from 2pm to 6pm) Monday to Friday. Before, you weren’t able to edit these defaults so, if you were a company that worked on Saturdays, you would have to edit the normal availability every time you added a resource.

Now, if you have the correct permissions, you can go into Settings and the first tab in the ‘Resources’ section is labelled ‘Default Availability’. From here, it’s pretty straightforward, just click on the resource type you want to edit and change the time blocks accordingly. The new availability settings will be used as the default for all future resources added to the system.

What’s in store for custom availability?

There’s plenty more in store for custom availability settings. For a start we’re going to make it much easier to edit the time blocks. We are also going to give you the ability to edit a resource’s availability settings at the time that you add them to the app.

A bit further down the line we want to give you the ability to make irregular changes to the availability for specific days, eg if a resource agrees to work late on Thursday – but just this once. Currently this type of booking would end up on the Waiting List.

We hope you find these availability settings useful and, as always, we would love to hear your thoughts.

We’re levitating with joy to announce the launch of Resource Guru’s powerful new reports. Now you can easily monitor your resource utilization and gain valuable new insights into your business. You can instantly see the lay of the land over the coming weeks and months and be better prepared.

Need to know how much capacity you have over the next month? Which resources are under or over-utilized? Or which projects are consuming the most time? With Resource Guru’s new reports, resource enlightenment is just a click away.

Capacity planning

Let’s say you want to do some capacity planning for the next few weeks. Just select the date range you’re interested in and you can instantly see the percentage utilization of all your resources.

You can also see the total number of hours that have been booked along with the amount of time that is sitting on the waiting list. The waiting list is a really useful feature because it highlights resource shortfalls allowing you time to take corrective action by hiring freelancers or adjusting project schedules etc. Want to see which resource has the highest number of hours on the waiting list? No problem, just sort by waiting list column and you can see which resources are in the shortest supply.

Focus on individual resources

Drilling down to focus on individual resources is easy – just click on the resource and you get a report like this.

Here, you can see the resources utilization along with the number of hours spent on each project or client. This is really useful for instantly getting a picture of what is consuming most of the resource’s time.

Projects and clients

Click on a project or client report to get a picture of how time is allocated to individual clients and projects. This is especially useful for analyzing if you are under or over-servicing clients.

Resource types

People are often the most important resources for companies so the default view focuses on people. But you can also filter reports by the major resource types as follows.

Looking back

Sometimes you want to track your utilization progress by looking back at past months. Resource Guru makes it just as easy to look back as it does to look forwards. Just select the date range you want to focus on – it’s as easy as that.

Utilization – not as simple as you might think

When we were developing reports, we realized that reporting on utilization is not quite as simple as you might think. The calculation is simple enough – you just divide the hours booked by the total hours available and multiply by 100. That’s the easy bit. But there are a couple of really important things to take into account first.

Firstly, you need to know the amount of time a resource is available for. With Resource Guru, you can specify the exact times when each resource is available during the week – eg Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm  - this is essential for accurate utilization reports. Having one set of availability settings for all resources will skew your numbers (unless each resource is available for exactly the same times).

Secondly, you need to know the date when the resource started. For example, if you’re reporting on an entire year but the resource only started in August, your utilization percentage will be wrong unless you take this start date into account. That’s why you will sometimes see a little note next to a resource saying when their reporting date starts, as follows.

This date is based on when they were added to Resource Guru or the date of their earliest booking, whichever date is earliest.

Simplicity and speed

When we designed these reports, we were careful to make them as easy to use as possible. We’ve seen reports in other apps where you’re confronted by a baffling array of settings to choose from before you get to see anything at all. We wanted to steer well clear of this approach and allow you to get straight to the reports that matter in just a few clicks with virtually no configuration at all.

We also wanted to make selecting date ranges as easy as possible – that’s why you will see convenient date ranges like this to save you time.

What’s next for reports?

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve Resource Guru, so we will be focusing on the following for future updates to reports:

• Budgets – when we integrate budget features into Resource Guru, these will appear in the reports.
• Filters – it would be useful to be able to filter the resource types by categories like location, department, skills etc.
• Printing/downloading – you can print these reports but we would like to enhance the way they look and also add the ability to download reports in various formats.

We’ve put a lot of thought into these reports and hope you like what we’ve done. We’d love to hear your thoughts.