Having a staff schedule in one central place is a great way to align the organization on where everyone's time is going. Here's how to build one.
If you are working with multiple projects at the same time and a single talent pool to serve all needs, keeping things organized is paramount for successful outcomes.
How do you make sure to always match the right people with the right skills and roles to the right projects at the right time? And how do you make sure everyone actually has the means necessary to commit to and deliver those projects? The answer is simple — you need to build a staff schedule.
We're here to walk you through the basics of its very concept and lay out easy steps you can follow to build a staff schedule for your people and projects.
A staff schedule is a timetable that shows what project everyone is working on and when. It can be visualized using as a resource heatmap, indicating the magnitude of your team's workload. Creating a staff schedule is an important part of staff planning.
The more people, projects, and touchpoints, the more difficult it becomes to create a staff schedule. In fact, they say that once your headcount hits the 25 mark, everything breaks. There are so many connection lines in place that there is no way to keep track of it all (without automation).
But that is where a staff schedule comes to rescue. It helps you structure and organize resources to avoid risks and traps.
Strategic staffing is not only a great way to identify and organize the company's workforce, but also a tried and tested approach that helps you make sure no one is overworked, over- or underbooked, and that there is a clear plan to complete the project on time and within your set budget.
There are many other reasons that explain why a staff schedule is important but it all comes down to this: it always helps you efficiently use existing resources and strategically hire new ones.
Further reading: Strategic Staffing - Aligning Talent with Organizational Goals
The steps to creating a staff schedule can vary based on the number of projects you’re managing and the size of your resource pool. Here, we’ll outline the essential steps you should never skip when building an employee schedule.
To clearly understand your resource demand and create a staffing plan, you first need to have a visual of all the projects, phases, milestones, and tasks that need to be covered by your people.
A Gantt chart is always a good idea if you want to visualize those items and layer them onto each other so you understand how to best approach staff scheduling and where you can save time.
Once you know the relevant project scope, budget and timelines, you can break your projects into stages or milestones to make it easier for your people to prioritize work.
With that covered, you should have a list of tasks to complete together with a general idea of the type of expertise you need for the project.
There are three standard items to consider for your resource needs:
It's not enough to just match your people to the projects you have outlined. Instead, you need to make sure their workloads, experience, and price tag allow for you to match them to those specific projects.
And if this sounds like a little too much to take in and analyze at the same time, it is. That's why you have staff scheduling software like Runn, which centralizes all this information and simplifies the process, while you oversee and supervise the process.
To find the right people to do the job, you need to have a good visibiltiy into your talent pool. What are your people particularly good at, what skills are they missing, and what can you achieve by upskilling some of them?
A resource inventory is one of those reusable assets you will be revisiting during every project and staffing adventure in search of relevant information. If you don't already have one, it's good to work on that before you start assigning people to specific tasks. You will be able to see the whole team in one single place and easily tell who has the best skillset to work on the tasks you have.
In fact, resource visibility is a pain point many resource managers share but once you have that under control, maintaining optimal staffing levels will be easier than ever.
This is the point where your staff schedule fully materializes as you assign specific people to specific projects or tasks. Exactly how you assign those people will usually depend on the staffing model you choose to follow, company goals and limitations.
In one of our recent webinars, we talked to people from The Ready, where they shared the staffing model they use and why it has proved to be so effective. Unsurprisingly, it is a skills matrix that stands in the core of their strategic project staffing. They prioritize resource visibility and transparency in order to assign the best people to all tasks. In other words, this agency does their staff schedules based on skills, availability, and capacity of their resources.
➡️ Related: What We Like About The Ready's Staffing Model
But as a staff manager, you need to consider both company goals and individual preferences when creating a staff schedule that will meet everyone's needs and expectations.
Project delivery is always dynamic. You might face scope creep, some employees might have a shift in priorities, other factors might come into play, etc. This means that your scheduling system needs to evolve together with the projects you're managing.
Does everyone have everything they need to deliver their best work? Is their work-life balance up to par? Is your staff schedule going as expected or do you need to adjust some things for optimal results? Be sure to regularly track your project progress, check how your resources are doing, and make the necessary adjustments.
Before we wrap this up, here are a few more pointers to consider when building work schedules.
