What are the best tools for resource planning that integrate with Harvest time tracking? Learn key alternatives to Harvest Forecast in our recent roundup.
On its own, Harvest offers a time tracking solution, but coupled with Harvest Forecast, you could also do resource planning on top of it. But rumors have it that Harvest Forecast is discontinuing their support — so does it make sense to stay on?
If it's true, many companies will be facing two scenarios. Stop resource planning and do time tracking alone, or find an advanced alternative that will easily integrate with Harvest and help you step up your resource planning game.
Considering just how important resource planning is when you manage projects, finding a new and, preferably even better, resource management tool is paramount for success.
Here are the best Harvest Forecast alternatives you should look at first of all.
When you couple Harvest and Runn, the dilemma of how to manage complex projects will be gone. With this tandem on the table, you will be able to easily schedule resources and predict project delivery.
When advanced time tracking (Harvest) and resource planning (Runn) get synced, you will forget about having to do double data entry and switch between different applications. Here all of your projects, people, and timesheets will be available within a single user-friendly dashboard.
Need to get a high-level view of your resource capacity? Not a problem too! This integration allows you to create schedules for your resources and projects, making it easy to track your utilization targets and avoid people getting overbooked.
You can also do some fortune telling here to see how your projects are going to unravel. You can use your Harvest data to fine-tune your project expectations in Runn and see how various dependencies will impact your project profitability, budget, and delivery timeline.
Last but not least, you get to gain insights into your variances by comparing planned schedules with actual performance. Use this information to refine your plans and create better resource schedules as you move forward with your projects.
Forecast App (not the same as Harvest Forecast) is another integration you should seriously consider if you are looking for advanced resource planning features. As one of the best project management tools today, Forecast helps you couple an excellent time tracking app with deep AI planning capabilities.
This integration is a two-way sync that will help you connect all time tracking data from Harvest to projects and tasks in Forecast.
Whether you prefer Agile, Scrum, or Waterfall project management approach, Harvest and Forecast will help you liquidate tons of manual work and focus on more demanding tasks instead.
In short, it is a matter of simplifying your workflows. It's also an opportunity to declutter your tech space as you will no longer have to jump from one tool to another when managing project tasks, registering time, or creating invoices.
Most importantly, it is not just project progress data that you can sync between the two tools, but also things like budgeting and reported hours so your financial data is available everywhere within a few clicks.
If you choose to go for Productive as a replacement for Harvest Forecast, your journey will start with an easy migration (from Harvest to Productive) where you will be able to import projects, tasks, users, cost rates, time rates, contacts, and companies.
As for Productive's resource planning potential, you'll get to effectively balance your team's workload and assigned tasks so you can always see who needs more work and who is already overbooked. If you are unsure about some aspects of your projects and whether you have enough people to cover them, create placeholders to see where resources would need to go should you start hiring.
Important thing to note! You can only import relatively recent projects from Harvest to Productive, ones that have been worked on or edited within the last 365 days. So if you have an old project to dig up from the archives here — this particular option might not be the best for you.
When it comes to resource planning with Hive, there is a lot to be said.
But to keep it short, you start by exporting your time tracking, online invoicing, billing, and streamlined employee timesheets documentation into Hive. Then, you can move forward to explore the various strategic management elements of resource management here.
To better understand your resource availability, allocate team resources (whether it is individuals or placeholders) to see how you can make your projects feasible. Use simple dashboards to view workplace activity, track projects, and schedule teams as you progress with your initiatives.
To see whether you are using your resources right and reuse that time tracking data coming in from Harvest, look into utilization reports to understand whether you can optimize some processes to make your teams more efficient.
With Wrike Integrate, you get to automate entire project workflows.
For project managers this means getting away from tens of tools and simplifying management processes. In this time and age, people try to automate as many things as they can, and this is exactly what Wrike can offer.
Using advanced insights from the tool, you can anticipate resource demand and see whether optimizing team workload will free up enough space in their capacity or whether it makes sense to get more people on the team.
Additionally, you can monitor project progress, manage time spent on tasks to stay on budget, and help your teams be as productive as possible at all times.
One way or another, project planning and resource management go hand in hand with time tracking. When tracking time, you are also tracking how efficient your resources are. And in order to help them improve, you need to know who and when is working on what.
Doing time tracking without resource management is like leaving a cake half-baked — you gather data, but then don't use it for optimizing processes and strategies.
Having advanced resource management tool accompanying your time tracking app is the way to have full grip over the success of your projects.
Start a free trial with Runn to see how you can leverage a resource management platform for better project outcomes!
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