Allocate Blog

Booking a new project? If you’ve been using tags to set up your People, you can drill down to any team or function quickly to find the team for your next new project.

1. Click the pencil icon next to a Person’s name to open the edit panel. Click on a “new tag” and enter a descriptor you’ll use to find them later--like a team name (design) or specialization (ruby).

2. Then, with the editing panel closed, you’ll be able to filter People, not just by their names now, but also by any tags you’ve added.

3. So when you’re looking for a designer for your next project, they’ll be easy to find.

Wishing you new projects aplenty to book in the new year! Happy Holidays!

- Erin

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In this series, we’re sharing MojoTech’s experiences around creating and using Allocate. We’ve learned a lot about resource scheduling along the way, and hope to help agencies like us with these lessons, too. We've explained why we created Allocate and what made that a great experience, and now we'd like to share how we make the most of the app as a team. 

One of Allocate’s strongest features is its seamless real-time updating. You’ve seen it keep your team in the loop on availability throughout the week. But if, like Mojotech, you run a weekly scheduling meeting, you can also offer your managers a real-time visual of your upcoming weeks as you schedule just by updating Allocate along the way.

Why is this great?

• No one has to take notes or struggle with a spreadsheet during the meeting.

• If someone missed mention of a change, it’s likely already updated on their screen.

• You can use Allocate to illustrate a scheduling suggestion to your group.

How does MojoTech do it?

On a call every Friday afternoon, the MojoTech managers run down our list of current and upcoming projects to confirm staffing for the next four weeks. (You can, of course, plan out as little or as far out as suits your agency.) Project statuses are discussed and allocation bubbles are added, extended or changed during the call. Adjustments needed to make room for new business are made along the way, and unallocated resources are often assigned to internal projects (like Allocate and mojotech.com).

We do this all on a call together so that resources and projects can be negotiated, and side details can be shared that may not have been otherwise.

Finally, we click the “Email Team” button to send everyone a copy of their upcoming schedules.

Tips:

• Make an effort to get all the managers on the call. If everyone knows who’s working on what, and why, you’ll have an easier time negotiating any bumps in the the week ahead when clients’ needs change (or bugs crop up).

• Update Allocate as you discuss the schedule, and your shared tool is up to date at the end of your meeting.

• Remember that while Allocate doesn’t replace a weekly team scheduling meeting, real-time updates certainly help when you can’t get everyone together. Just remember to discuss conflicts well ahead of any resource confusion.

Hi everyone - we have a couple exciting feature releases today:

Manage more than one group or team? Add another board to your account from the dropdown in the top right. Just click “New Board” to start a fresh screen. To get back, just use that same Account dropdown to navigate between boards. They’ll always be connected, but you do have to invite any people you’d like to share this new board with.

- Erin

Today we released a new feature: Split. Some of us found it a little cumbersome adding vacations and holidays in between long, already scheduled allocations. Now you can split up a bubble and insert a new one with just two clicks.

To split up an existing allocation, click on its bubble in the spot where you'd like to insert something new--that will bring up the new edit menu. Click “Split” to break up that bubble and add a new allocation in between. Add the new project name and adjust lengths as usual. “Edit” lets you change the project name or add a note, and "Delete" now lets you quickly delete that allocation bubble.

This release also speeds up filtering, which you’ll notice especially if you have a longer team list.

Let us know what you think!

- Erin Costanzo Cummins

Last week I shared with you how our unruly scheduling spreadsheet motivated the MojoTech team to build our resource scheduling solution, Allocate. 

We knew we had to keep Allocate simple--not just because we thrive at building focused apps for our clients, but we really wanted to get off of our bloated scheduling spreadsheet as soon as possible. Allocate was going to solve a painful problem, which made for excellent motivation for sticking to an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Any scope creep would not only balloon our investment in the tool, but also delay the day we could start using the solution we’d been searching for.

We started by defining the problem: managers needed to know who's working on what and when, so that they can easily see our team’s availability, and therefore, more easily respond to new requests from clients. Yes, there were all kinds of useful things that this app could do, too, but we narrowed down the core elements that we needed it to represent: people and projects on a calendar grid. Here's a screenshot that illustrates that core functionality:

Of course, the great ideas for additional features rolled in. We iceboxed just about all of them. MojoTech schedules in full weeks, four weeks out, so Allocate beta features full weeks, four weeks in a view. We kept it lean by solving just MojoTech's problem, and would later build from there.

Four short weeks later, with contributions from across the team, we had our MVP, Allocate beta, and MojoTech enjoyed its benefits immediately. The successful release of a super-focused MVP benefited our group in three ways:

• MojoTech got to ditch the scheduling spreadsheet(!) and enjoy a much richer view of our most valuable assets--our people!

• Allocate receives early user data and feedback from all the other agencies (thank you!) trying out the app. Our future customers are telling us what they need.

• Team members, sitting in the client’s chair for this one, got to experience making the hard, but correct prioritizing decisions.

So, before simply adding features large and small, we're collecting the feedback and usage data that will shape our upcoming releases.

Have some feedback on Allocate? Go ahead and post it here in the comments, or send it on over to allocate@allocatehq.com.

Subscribe to these posts up on the left so that you don't miss out next week. We'll show you how MojoTech uses Allocate to unify our dispersed management team over our weekly team scheduling meeting.

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Through this series we aim to share with you, likely managers at similar agencies, the valuable resource scheduling lessons we at MojoTech have learned along the way. I thought it would be helpful to start with the story (and picture) of why we built Allocate, because you likely can relate to where we were coming from last year.

For about two years MojoTech used a spreadsheet to track our resource allocations before we decided to build Allocate. At the time the spreadsheet met our needs, but became cumbersome and time-consuming to use as we outgrew it. Here’s a screenshot of what it looked like at the time of abandonment, showing the upcoming four weeks from the last time we used it back in March 2013:

Yeah, it’s kind of a mess. And compared to Allocate’s UI, I’m finding the colored grid blocks pretty funny. I’ve included it here not just for a chuckle, but in case some of you can relate. I know there are agencies out there still tracking their allocations on a shared spreadsheet, or maybe even in some physical manifestation within your office (post-its on your wall?).

Week after week, we were manually adding columns for days and weeks, rows for people, and color-coding projects. Whoever was running our weekly scheduling meeting would have to open up that spreadsheet five minutes ahead of time just to get the next week’s calendar set up and ready for updating. And then we’d add the little colored blocks to denote a resource on a project for an upcoming week. It was a distracting chore and there was too much room for simple human error--accidentally giving an allocation a wrong project color or dating a week incorrectly. We found ourselves leaving out important information when we ran out of room or needed to make a note.

We knew we had out-grown the spreadsheet, but we couldn’t find a tool that was faster and easier to start using than what we had now. But…we’re MojoTech--we build apps! So why don’t we just build a tool ourselves that solves this resource allocation problem? After some market research, we decided to go ahead and build Allocate, hoping it would help other agencies like us, too. All those spreadsheet-related headaches we were experiencing motivated us to work fast, and the result is the beta release of Allocate that you see today at www.allocatehq.com.

Next week, we’ll discuss how releasing Allocate was a truly rewarding lesson in to sticking to an MVP.

- Erin Costanzo Cummins

Sign up for Allocate.  |  Follow us on Twitter @AllocateHQ.

In our upcoming blog series, we’ll be sharing MojoTech’s experiences around creating and using Allocate. We’ll highlight our resource scheduling best practices and lessons learned to help other agencies working with the same challenges. 

Knowing how to manage time better is something we all could get better at doing. Whether it's managing time while at work or time with your family, we all wish we had a few extra hours everyday. So how can you manage time better with less time? It sounds like something out of the 4-Hour Workweek, doesn't it?

Before we begin there are a few mental hurdles you must clear in order to achieve more time to work with.

Start respecting the time you have. Get serious about it. We all know someone who is super productive and gets a lot done during the day. Chances are they're pretty serious and super selective about where they spend their time. They're not checking their Facebook or watching Youtube when they should be answering emails or writing a report. They are organized, prepared, and know exactly what they have to get done for the day. Respect the way you spend your time and it will start rewarding you with more.

This leads us to the next step.

Track your time for an entire week. After every task you complete, log what you did and how long it took. Be very strict about logging everything. If you spend 15 minutes looking at the latest animated cat gifs on reddit you better put it in your log. Don't be ashamed. This is your baseline of productivity. How will know if you're making time if you don't know how much you were spending in the first place?

Pat yourself on the back. Being accountable every minute of every day is a hard task, so you deserve it! Now that you have logged of all activities for the week, take time to analyze and discover where you're wasting your time. Did you use the bathroom a lot? Take a few more snack breaks than you thought? You may be surprised at how much and where you wasted your time during the week. What did you find out?

Write your findings down because you'll be experimenting next. To help you analyze your activity log I've created of list of time wasters to be on the look out for:

• Bathroom Breaks
• Snack breaks
• Smoke breaks
• Phone calls with Friends
• Social media sites
• Blogs
• Interruptions
• Non-business meetings
• Daydreaming

You've got a lot data about yourself. So what should you do? That's really up to you but here are a few tweaks you could try out in the upcoming weeks.

1. Schedule all phone meetings to occur during one day of the week. Make the calls back to back so you can get them out of the way and so that they don't distract you and un-prioritize your tasks.

2. Wake up earlier. If you're a night owl, this one is hard, but if you noticed you're being interrupted during your peak hours you may have bite the bullet and wake up a few hours earlier. You'd be amazed how much you can get done when no one is bugging you.

3. Use software meant to simplify your life. You' don't have to do everything yourself, you can save time by using allocatehq.com to delegate to and manage contractors. And there are browser toolbars that block Facebook, YouTube and any other Internet distraction during your day.

4. Stop checking your email all day long. Try checking it twice a day at 10am and 2pm. This may seem scary at first but when you're a slave to email, you're constantly pulling away from your current priorities

5. Turn off the clock on your computer. Many people have the bad habit of glancing at the clock every so often to see what time it is. All of these glances are distracting you from work and make it difficult to re-focus in on the task at hand. Stop being a slave to time and start getting your work done.

6. Remove all distractions from your work area. Somebody pays you to get a job done, so avoid unemployment by skipping the extra snack, smoke and gossip breaks.

7. Block off on a calendar all the things you need to do for the week. If you have any problems with procrastination, which is often the biggest culprit of time-wasting habits, you can benefit from a better schedule.

For example, if you check reports every Monday morning, block off the amount of time you estimate it should take you, in your case it's between the hours of 9 and 10. When 9am on Monday morning rolls around, you check those reports. You don't check your email, you don't chat with your co-workers you only do the task you have blocked off. This may seem very strict, but it's actually frees your mind from having to worry about other things.

If you breeze through in less time than you anticipated, move on to your next task. Keep this up and you'll be done before you know it.

Getting more time is all about focus. The better you can keep your attention on the task at hand, the faster you can get things done. It takes determination and willpower to master managing your time better. By structuring your time during the week, you give yourself the foundation of what focus is and what your time means. Get serious about using your days deliberately and the nights and weekends could be yours!

In the Loop

Missed Milestones

Reminders to Remember

Doing the Right Thing at the Right Time

Power