Today we release the first cut of Gantto’s resource manager. We are really excited about this new feature because it enables a completely new view of your project and easily highlights potential scheduling conflicts. (We are also really excited because this is one of our most requested features.)
TL;DR
Gantto can now do this:
Use Case
We are looking to serve a few related use cases with this new capability:
- How can you quickly display what each individual of your team is working on at any one time?
- How can you quickly see which resources are scheduled over or under capacity?
- Once you have them identified, how can you easily make adjustments to the plan (hint: drag and drop)
Resource Manager Allocation Example
Lets start off with a simple schedule like the one below. Here Chris and Fed are working on two features, the Resource Manager and the Work Calendar:
This schedule looks simple enough, but what is not clear is that is actually has both Chris and Fed over allocated by 100%. To see this, we click View-> Resources and get this view:
This view shows the tasks organized by the resources who are responsible for them. Here it is clear that both Chris and Fed have a number of tasks which overlap each other (i.e., they are doing two things at once.) Now that we have this insight, it is easy to return to the View->Data view and slide the summary for the Work Calendar over one week like this:
And the resulting resource chart looks like this:
And now Chris and Fed are no longer over-allocated.
If life were only that simple 
As a consequence of solving the overallocation problem, the release of the Work Calendar is pushed out one week. The Gantt Chart and the Resource Chart help to motivate why that is. It is up to you to communicate that effectively to the stakeholders.
Resource Manager Add New Resource Example
It is also possible to add new resources in the resource view. Just click “Add New Resource”
You have the option to list the full name as well as nicknames for each resource. (This makes rendering the resources on the views more compact and less cluttering.)
And now that we have this new wonderful QA resource, we can simple drag the testing tasks from Chris’ list to theirs:
And then we can drop the assignment into QA’s list:
Add Resources in Spreadsheet Mode
On a related note, if you work with a lot of resource allocation you should definitely check out our full spreadsheet view for your Gantt Charts. It makes it really easy to go down the list and add resources to each task:
As ever we would love to hear what you think! Please do not hesitate to email me: chris@gantto.com with any comments, suggestions or bugs!
From this menu I will deselect the dependency and resource columns:
Exiting the menu commits the changes to the chart:
And drop it behind the end date column:
From there you can select the plan you are interested in:
