Why Schedule Visibility is the Secret to Staffing Success

Schedule visibility is concerned with the amount of information a manager can see when they are making resource allocation decisions.

Like a lookout in a crow’s nest, schedule visibility helps you spot the best course through a project and dodge icebergs along the way – those avoidable obstacles like scheduling clashes, overutilization, or overservicing the client.  

Low or default visibility might mean you can only see basic information, such as capacity and availability. Sure, you can see when someone’s available, but you don’t know if they’re already stretched too thin or what they’ll cost your project.

High visibility would include resource capacity and availability, current allocations, allocation end time, project dates, time zone, and more. So you can pick someone with the right amount of time, at the right point in the project, ensuring they have a balanced workload and keeping the project on budget. 

Doesn't that sound so much better? Let’s look a little deeper at how schedule visibility drives staffing success in human resource-intensive businesses like yours. 

Visibility goes hand-in-hand with optimizing resource utilization

Efficient resource utilization is essential in a business like yours, where the efficient use of human capital is key to project success and profitability. With high schedule visibility, you can ensure every team member is optimally utilized. This avoids the risks of:

Underutilization – Where people aren’t being scheduled enough billable hours. They’re on the bench, waiting for work. In this scenario, employees are burning money rather than earning it. And they’re probably getting pretty bored. This isn’t just financially wasteful, it also undermines employee satisfaction and can lead to turnover.

Overutilization – Where people are scheduled too much work. In this situation, employees are billing high, but they’re stressed and overstretched. This risks the quality of their work and your project outcomes, as well as their mental and physical health. Unchecked, consistent overutilization leads to absence and turnover. 

With high schedule visibility, you can: 

• Look at your project schedule 
• Identify the tasks required at different stages
• See exactly who’s available at the right time
• Pick the best person in terms of time and talent

This boosts workload balance and staff engagement. But also your bottom line, ensuring billable hours are maximized while unnecessary costs – like replacing bored or burnout employees – are minimized.

Learn more: The Beginner’s Guide to Resource Scheduling ➡️

Better schedule oversight = more balanced workloads 

While we’re talking about balanced workloads, high visibility lets managers keep everyone's workloads fair and manageable. But why is that so important? 

• Productivity – When people have too much or too little work, it undermines productivity and profitability.  
• Quality – Overutilization undermines quality, as people rush to complete their work, get too stressed to focus, or too worn down to care. 
• Morale – Perceived unfairness in the distribution of work and opportunities can undermine staff morale and engagement.
• Turnover – Unhappy employees don’t stick around and that means you face the costs and disruption of turnover and recruitment.

Better schedule visibility provides insights into capacity and current allocations at individual, team, and organizational levels, so you can spot and address any imbalances that might create risk – to projects, people, and the business overall. 

Improved visibility unlocks better capacity planning

Capacity planning is about staffing supply and demand. It lets you understand future demand for resources, so you can ensure you have the right staff to deliver great work. With strong schedule visibility, you can forecast more accurately, preventing the risk of under or over-staffing. 

With proper schedule visibility, you can:

• Identify and quantify upcoming project demands and resource needs.
• Look at capacity, availability, and utilization at role, skill, team, or organization level.
• Spot gaps where you don’t have the people or skills for forthcoming work.

With low or default visibility, capacity planning is a guessing game. 

You might overcommit to projects without realizing you don’t have the people to deliver. This results in stressful last-minute scrambles to find people for projects. That can increase costs by forcing you to use expensive external hires or contractors. Or it can impact project outcomes through understaffing. 

Or, you might be too conservative, underestimating resource capacity. This means missed opportunities to take on additional work, and people twiddling their thumbs while they wait for work. 

Want more insights? Read about effective capacity forecasting ➡️

Proactive risk management is powered by visibility

Schedule visibility means you can see resource risks before they sink your project. What are resource risks? Things like:

• Resource shortages, where you don’t have enough people to deliver quality work on time. 
• Resource clashes, where different projects are relying on the same people at the same time.
• Skills shortages, where the available employees lack the expertise needed for specific projects.

Low or default schedule visibility means you’re planning in the dark – and that risks costly delays, rushed work, and quality issues. 

But higher schedule visibility means you can spot these issues in advance, so you can manage and mitigate them. For example, by upskilling team members, recruiting new staff, or adjusting project schedules. 

Further reading: How to prevent scheduling conflicts ➡️

Project performance: when you can see it, you can save it

While being forewarned is always better than firefighting, issues arise and managers have to react. That’s life. Schedule visibility helps you monitor project progress, spot problems as they occur, and course-correct before it’s too late. 

For example:

• If you notice a project is going over budget due to resource costs, you can review allocations to curb your spending.
• If a project is running ahead of schedule, you can reallocate team members where they’re more urgently needed.
• If a project is falling behind, you can bring in additional resources to get back on track .

High schedule visibility means managers can be more flexible and responsive to the reality of in-flight projects, making dynamic staffing adjustments to benefit their project and the wider portfolio. This maximizes utilization and efficiency while keeping projects on course.  

Read on: Understand the difference between staffing and scheduling ➡️

Schedule visibility puts sales and delivery on the same page

One of the biggest risks to project delivery is selling more projects than you can service. But it’s an on-too-common problem in professional service firms, thanks to poor schedule visibility and cross-functional collaboration.

Picture an organization where the sales and delivery teams don’t talk to one another. The sales team pursues KPIs around selling the maximum number of projects. Meanwhile, the delivery team is drowning in work they don’t have the capacity for, and their client satisfaction KPIs are at risk.

Improving schedule visibility – not just for project managers but everyone involved in the project pipeline – reduces this serious risk. Sales teams understand capacity and can bring in projects that use available time and talent.

E-commerce agency Anatta Design explains that improving cross-team understanding of capacity and schedules meant that their sales and delivery teams could operate more strategically, making opportunities out of dips in demand:

Sales [could] prioritize selling projects where we have bandwidth. So if they see that, for instance, we’re going to have two people on the bench in a month, Sales notes that they should sell into this role."

Discover the importance of high operational visibility and how to achieve it ➡️

Visibility creates high trust and high accountability environments

Finally, improving schedule visibility improves accountability. What does that mean? Well, it means everyone knows what a project needs to succeed and the part they play in it. Each team member can see the project schedule and understand when and why their contribution matters. 

But it isn’t just about team members doing their bit. Schedule visibility also empowers people to speak up when they have a problem. 

They can evidence overutilization or resource clashes that will negatively impact them and their ability to deliver. And they can call out imbalance workloads or other sources of inequality. This visibility builds trust, which contributes to higher morale and engagement. 

Learn more: Unlocking Employee Engagement ➡️

Take your next step toward schedule visibility

Schedule visibility isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s essential for the success and profitability of your projects, as well as the engagement and retention of your workforce.

It provides managers and leaders with a clear view of resource capacity and availability – so you can avoid the common pitfalls of poor utilization, schedule slips, employee turnover, and missed opportunities.