As you know, Allocate was built to simplify scheduling as it applies to our own business--software development. That personal, agency-focused perspective shaped Allocate’s early feature set and messaging, but since our release, we’ve heard from users across many industries: pharmaceuticals, law, architecture and even a printer. Getting to know our user base helped us realize that Allocate could be really useful to anyone who has resources they need to book.

We’ve now seen Allocate used for tracking year-long pharmaceutical launches, assigning legal associates to cases, allocating architects to projects, and physical equipment to booked orders. We realized our marketing message, focused on agencies, was excluding a variety of other applications.

So while our marketing page was due for a design upgrade, we decided to open up the messaging a bit to include some other industries. The broader approach has certainly been successful before. Trello does an excellent job of marketing their organizational tool across use cases. So do Wunderlist and Evernote.

Check out our update here. We were even able to collect some nice testimonials from our favorite managers in a couple different industries.

Why now? Allocate’s a young concept that we’re still working to validate. While we’re sifting out our best target audiences, it makes sense take a more broad approach and narrow from there, rather than refine the narrow, agency-focused scope that we launched with.

Does this affect current users? Nope--that’s how flexible Allocate is. Except for an adjustment to what we call your resources (they’re not always people!), you won’t notice any changes to the app.

Your thoughts and feedback are always welcome!

- Erin

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Since Allocate has such a simple, straight forward scheduling interface, I wanted to share a bit about how it can be used for scheduling equipment. 

If your job is to manage scheduling of any sort of equipment, workspace or locations that are booked in daily, weekly, or monthly chunks, Allocate is going to help simplify not only the tracking, but also the sharing of that information across your team.

It’s fast to set up--just type your resources in the first column, and click in the calendar to add allocations for the days it’s already booked. Allocate comes ready to go with a monthly and weekly calendar grid aligned next to your list of resources.

Track availability of any type of resource, and share that information seamlessly with your other managers. Allocate updates in real time, so if they have the app open in their browser, they’ll see your change immediately.

Are you using Allocate to schedule equipment, workspace or another non-human resource? Let me know how it’s working out for you!

- Erin

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It’s been five months since I started as Product Manager for Allocate (MojoTech’s super-simple resource planning app). What have I learned? One trend that stood out was that users were signing up, but not staying on to actively use the app - even though it was free. This told us that people were definitely looking for an easy scheduling tool, but that Allocate wasn’t everything they’d hoped it would be. We needed to fix that!

The first step was to speak to our beta users. They gave us great feedback on features large and small that they were looking for, like the ability to “zoom out” to a month view. Next we tackled speed and performance issues and some key UX and UI pain points that we heard consistently. Importantly we also added event tracking across the app to see how people really used Allocate. This helped us get to the point where we were confident that Allocate was a tool that would help businesses tackle resource scheduling and be worth paying for!

So let’s take a look at how things have changed in terms of active scheduling boards, user actions, time on the app and bounce rate - all measures of user engagement.

Some facts and and figures:

• We use Google Analytics to track events. We do this not only to see how users are interacting with the app, but also to track the amount of logged-in activity that is occurring on our account pages. Let’s define an “active account” as an account page that sees at least 4 visits a month where least one event occurs - like scrolling or changing an Allocation. Using that benchmark, we have seen our number of active account pages increase 70% since October, with an especially nice jump from December to January. If we go back five months, active accounts have quadrupled.

• Google Analytics also gives us an average visit duration. From August through October this was consistent at around 5 minutes. In November, after we released some nice usability fixes, it doubled to 10:27; 11:36 in December; and 8:42 in January for a healthy 52% increase overall. Total tracked events on the site follows basically the same curve.

• GoSquared shows us our bounce rate has decreased at a steady rate since the fall, ending 16% lower in January. Traffic has increased a bit during this time too, and our conversion rate has been consistent. The decreased bounce rate is great, and has been boosted by previously onboarded users returning to their dormant accounts.

Our users are staying on the site longer and performing more actions while they’re around. The November-December engagement increases line up with some nice performance enhancements and UI adjustments that definitely made the app faster and easier to use.

Allocate is on its way to being a really powerful tool, and there are plenty more features that have been requested that we know will help anyone schedule and plan more efficiently. We are also adding a little polish to our marketing site to attract even more users - and more invaluable feedback to help us build better product.

As always, feel free to share your thoughts on this subject or any questions/suggestions for Allocate here in the comments.

- Erin

Today we released a prettier allocation editing pop-up tool! 

You can still quickly split, edit and delete your allocations just by clicking on the bubble. In this iteration, we’ve added notes to that same tool, as well as a shortcut to your project settings--that’s where you can change the color and project-wide attributes and notes.

Check it out:

• Click on the allocation bubble you’d like to change.
• Type in a different project name to change this person’s project.
• “Split” will split this bubble in two--great for inserting a vacation or holiday.
• “Delete” will make this bubble go away (without affecting any others).
• “Settings” opens the project-wide settings and sorts to just this project (Click the X on the dropdown or press ESC close it).
• And, type in the “Notes” area to add any comments about this particular allocation.

Tip: Take full advantage of your remaining free weeks by creating additional boards--they’re great for visualizing potential changes that aren’t yet firmed up. 

From the account dropdown in the top right, click “New Board…” to start a fresh screen.

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In celebration of our launch this week, we're giving away a year of Allocate Premium to one of the lucky users that Tweets us a pick of how their team uses Allocate. 

So boot up your group's schedule, gather the team, and shoot a pic on over to @AllocateHQ using #giveaway. We'll announce a random winner next Friday, January 24th!

Check out Nick's set up:

Now, send over yours!

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When we started building Allocate to replace our scheduling spreadsheet, we knew we were onto something. We couldn’t find a simple, collaborative, calendar grid that we actually enjoyed using. Now, thanks to all of our Beta users’ amazing feedback and support, we’re pleased to announce that we’re releasing Allocate’s full version today!

And, as all good things must come to an end, this release concludes our Beta program. If you’re currently a Beta user, your 30-day trial starts today. However, read on to see how you can enter to win a year of Allocate Premium, and continue using it for free until 2015!

Our flexible subscription model is now available--remember you still have 30 days before you’ll be asked to pick one. Small teams of three or less will be able to continue using Allocate for free.

Want to win a free year of Allocate Premium? Get your cameras ready! We’d love to see how you’re using Allocate at your scheduling meetings, and help one of our early users get Allocate Premium free for one year. Tweet us a pic of your team scheduling with @AllocateHQ AND #giveaway mentioned. We’ll announce a random winner next Friday January 24th!

As always, please shoot any issues, feedback or questions my way any time.

- Erin

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You asked and we listened. A zoomed-out view of your schedule several months out was your top Allocate feature request. And today, with just a click of the Month button, you can now peer into the future of your team’s utilization.

Use Month view to:

• Assess your current, future and past team utilization at a glance

• Catch upcoming blocks of availability

• Track future staffing needs more easily

Tip:  Add, delete and adjust longer allocations from your Month view. Head back to your Week view to see Notes and shorter vacations and holidays.

Let us know what you think!

- Erin

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With our sights set on a brighter, more successful year ahead, a lot of us are open to new ways to help meet our goals and improve efficiency at work. Are you exploring new tools to help get your house in order this year? If resource management is at the top of your list of things to streamline in 2014, give Allocate a spin! 

It’s super easy to get started: just sign up with your email and company name. Add a person, add a project, and you’re allocating!

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. In Part 4, we'd like to explore the "stocking" challenges of the service business.

Professional services is the ultimate expression of supply and demand. Our inventory is made up of humans, which makes for a much less flexible stocking system. It’s not easy to adjust your supply the same way a physical goods producer would simply order more components or advertise a sale to adjust for the market’s demand.

To account for this inflexibility, you need to plan ahead. Just as important as it is for you to see who is doing what, you need to know who is doing nothing. This is your excess inventory. Just as a widget producer is likely paying storage and interest on his components, you are paying salaries and benefits. However, you can’t exactly have a fire sale on your services. Since you’re working with humans, you need to plan ahead to make sure either everyone is busy, or that staffing changes are in the works.

A physical goods company wouldn’t be able to function without accurate projections of future shipments. Sure, you have time tracking for what’s already been done, but how about a roadmap of your future demand? Allocate gives you a real time view of your inventory, and also allows you to project, so that you know:

• Upcoming excess availability

• Upcoming bottlenecks

• Past team utilization rates

Example: Baxter is unallocated as of January 13th.

• Give Baxter a “project” called “UNALLOCATED” so that it’s clear to the other managers that this person does not have a client project, and so that you’ll be able to find your underutilized team members quickly.

• Set the project to not be counted towards utilized time, and give it a special color, like grey.

• Add the project to any people with upcoming availability you’d like to easily track.

• Use the filter to find everyone with “UNALLOCATED” scheduled so that you can quickly assign them something else instead. Note that Winston and Emma, with sufficient client work, are removed from this view to help you focus on the team members without billable projects.

→ These “unallocated” resources will help business development know where to sell more aggressively, and will help you prioritize work on your internal projects.

Allocate is a verb for a reason. So schedule your future projects, mark your unutilized people, pay attention to your growth rate and start projecting!

- Erin

Subscribe to the blog so that you don't miss out! Next time we’ll talk more about how to effectively use the time of the unallocated.

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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

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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

A Positive Frame of Mind

Clear Communication

The Right Environment

Daily Words of Encouragement

Empowerment

1. Time

2. Context

3. Resource Availability

4. Task Review

5. Fortune Telling

6. The Magic Hat Trick

1. Hiring

2. Firing

3. Purchasing

4. Project Management

5. Equipment Management

6. Sales Teams

7. Client Management

8. Expenses

9. Workplace Efficiency

10. Business Intelligence

Learning how to manage remote employees is a new skillset that just about every employer needs to get familiar with. With all the fantastic ways we can communicate via the web, our teams are no longer bound by geographic location. Your marketing director could live in Dubai and your office assistant could live in Dublin.

Lets begin with an overview of goals you should have in mind when managing remote employees.

• Creating a system that shows an overview of the team's effort.
• Giving employees a balanced and equal share of work.
• Effectively managing due dates.
• Motivating employees, even when they're 3,000 miles away.

Synchronize your team members.

If you don't already have a task management system, start looking, like now. It will be difficult to manage your team if you don't know what they're doing. Give yourself a couple weeks if you're adopting a new system. It will be difficult to get everyone on board, but be diligent. Set the example for your remote workers by using your task management system to its fullest extent.

Give ownership to tasks.

Making your employees accountable will give them a sense of accomplishment as well as make their tasks ahead much more clear. Giving everyone updates about who's working on what will keep communication up and competition friendly.

Be a guiding light.

If you see a task or project going astray, correct it constructively as soon as possible. Spend more time on the phone with remote employees to keep them on-task and on schedule. Sometimes remote employees get behind without anyone noticing until it's too late.

Plan further ahead than anyone.

Always have a back-up plan, you never know when you may hit a snag or need to let one of your remote employees go. Firing a remote employee is even more difficult than one in-house because it's typically you that will be re-training "the new guy".

Let the software do the heavy lifting.

You don't need to micromanage tasks. Let your software tell you what upcoming milestones and deadlines are ahead. Day Planners are for real estate agents, not project managers.

Meeting Deadlines

• Always ask your team what their estimation is for a task. You may be surprised at how much time they think it will take.
• Hold constructive discussions to find out what hang ups your team may have.
• Build in extra time for unforeseen challenges.
• Daily check-ins may help as deadlines approach.

Keep The Good Feeling Going

• Acknowledge and appreciate important achievements individually and collaboratively.
• Create an open environment where your team members can speak their minds.
• Be overly available to them. An open communication policy is essential.
• If you have the ability to send your team gifts, send them one when they finish a project. Even something small like an Amazon gift certificate can really boost someone's spirits and keep them motivated.
• Bring the whole team together once a year. This will do wonders for building company culture.
• Hold project wrap-up meetings to glean insights into what worked, what didn't and what could be removed.

Learning how to manage remote employees may take a little time but you'll get the hang of it. Organization and communication are the most important skills to strive for when forming a remote team. Have you had success managing people remotely? Do you have any insights into what make remote teams tick? Please share them with us in the comments section.

Knowing how to fire a contractor is an art form. It takes planning, tact and a keen assessment of the situation. Let's face it, no one wants to fire anyone.

But if you've ever watched a project fall behind because one of your contractors couldn't keep up or was in learn-as-you-go mode, you know that firing a contractor is one of the most stressful parts of managing a business.

In this article we hope to give you a framework for firing a contractor and some helpful hints to make the process as smooth and conflict-free as possible.

Preparation

Knowing how to fire a contractor all starts with the right level of preparedness. Below are a few precautionary steps you can take even before you start working with a new contractor.

Agreements

We aren't lawyers nor do we play them on TV, so please seek your professional legal council when drawing up the agreements that pertain to you and your business. The agreements you have with your contractors are the first place you can tighten up to make firing a contractor easier.

Your contracts should explicitly include language that states you have the right to terminate the contract and agreement for any reason and at any time. This agreement clause is helpful when you're trying out a new contractor and you may need to let them go quickly.

Add a "work for hire" line into your agreement for any intellectual work so that the creator of that work can't claim ownership of the content after they leave.

Vetting Your Contractors

How does that saying go? "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".

The same is true for hiring contractors. Finding good people to contract work out to will save you the hassle of having to fire them later. Even when you're busy and struggling to meet deadline, check their references and mentally scrutinize their work. Technically this isn't exactly in the scope of how to fire a contractor, but it's certainly a good way to avoid having to fire them.

Keeping a Stable

Having a stable of contractors on deck is a business savvy way to keep things running smooth. A contractor's not making the grade? Switch them out for one of your trusted contractors. The key to making this work is to build trusted relationships with your contractors that rock.

Did they really kick butt on that last project? Send them a bonus. Is it their birthday? Send them a gift. This is where constant communication with your "stable" is crucial. It also means you need a simple, easy to use resource planning tool (ahem) to organize which contractors are available.

Monitoring Your Contractors

Constant communication is the key to keeping a good relationship with your contractors.

When you're working several active projects, its key to have daily contact with your contractors. A daily check-in meeting is a great way to see how a project is progressing and one of the best ways you can foresee problems arising before they get worse. You can use services like Hipchat or Skype to get updates throughout the day.

Observe how your contractor acts, too. Are they constantly late to meetings? Are they always missing milestone dates? They may need more motivation for you or they may need to be let go. There isn't any way to sugarcoat it. Some people just don't take contract work seriously. They see a paycheck and they just want to get to the finish line. If you get that vibe from them, let them go before it really hurts your business.

How To Fire

This is the easiest and the most uncomfortable part of the process. One thing to note before you fire your contractor: keep detailed records of the systems, services and tools that your contractors have access to.

You should have the ability to control any account they have access to. The last thing you want is for your freshly fired contractor to take revenge.

When dealing with a new contractor it may be a good idea to have weekly (or even daily) file check-ins where they submit their latest work into you. That way if you have to fire them you have their latest draft of the project.

Tips for the firing

• Be calm and friendly, remember it's just business.
• Be short and to the point with why you're firing them. You don't need to get into great detail or insult them. If they wasted too much money, it might be your fault for waiting too long to recognize the problem.
• With contractors you may want to explain to them that this project didn't best fit their skillset, but future ones might.
• If they reach for external excuses, explain to them that you've already made up your mind.
• Explain how much they'll be paid based on the work they have already performed (another reminder to keep good records and log hours weekly!)
• Keep a record of why you fired someone and look for warning signs in the future.

Firing someone sucks. Being prepared and organized can make the process less stressful and help you spot problem contractors earlier. Do you have a contractor horror story? We'd love to hear about it.

1. Watch Out for Bank Fees

2. Make It Easy for Clients to Pay You

3. Stop Spending Money on Dining Out

4. Go Easy on the Supplies

5. Skip the Booth & Just Attend

6. Set an Example

7. Be a Better Scientist

What is resource planning? Good question. Depending on whom you're talking to, resource planning can mean something different to just about everyone. So for this article we'll just discuss resource planning in general terms.

A great way to think of resource planning is the organization of people, equipment and other critical assets to complete a task. This could be a task for school, organization or in the workplace. It's used for managing many simple tasks and also complex projects, like building a spaceship. Most of the time you won't need to plan out simple tasks and projects, but when things start to get complicated you'll be glad you had a simple to use resource planning tool like allocatehq.com.

Resource planning is most essential for when you're in charge of a time-sensitive project that requires a team of people, lots of equipment and has multiple phases before the project is complete. Below are few key areas resource planning can come into play. We'll be using a couple different real world scenarios to illustrate these points.

Gauging Bandwidth

Imagine you're the production director of a video production studio. You have been asked to submit a proposal for seven 30-second commercials in four weeks. This could mean a great deal of money to your firm, but does your company have the bandwidth to take on such a large short-term project?

Before submitting a proposal, you should probably find out what the availability of your production crew is, what production facilities are open and what equipment is unavailable. You need to have all of this information at your fingertips in a simple organized system.

Using a tool to manage all of these resources can help you determine which projects you have the bandwidth for. Because there's nothing worse than taking the time and resources to bid for project you can't complete because you overlooked what resources are available. This will save you time and money.

Avoid Losing Money & Making Clients Mad

A video production company is just one example of how a company can use resource planning in the discovery phase of a project.

Let's now pretend you're already knee deep into a project and you have a situation pop up where you need to act fast to keep everything running smoothly while keeping the client or customer off your back.

Pretend for a minute that you're now the construction site manager for the newest Dunkin' Donuts to be built in the great city of Providence.

You're three days away from the building being complete when one of your flat bed trucks breaks down.

This is a big problem. You have to deliver the Dunkin' Donuts sign for the outside of the building. This could keep the entire job from being complete for an extra couple of days if you have one single resource to transport that sign.

By more effectively planning your resources, you can reroute a secondary flat bed truck that was on its way back from another job site, preventing a needless delay and keeping your client pleased! And we all need another Dunkin' Donuts, right?

Keeping Contractors Happy

So you've saved the day in both your video production and construction companies but there is another area that resource planning can have a huge impact on. Keeping your contractors happy.

Much like a maitre d' in a restaurant, you need to spread the work around to keep your waiters (in your case, contractors) happy. Resource planning lets you know who's doing what and who's available to handle something new.

Steady work keeps contractors happy and more reliable and makes your organization run like a well-oiled machine. It makes business sense to use resource planning.

So we hope we answered your question. It's a topic that's near and dear to our hearts. How does resource planning fit into your workflow? How does it save you money? Lets us know in the comments!