Pluspunten
The ease of use and availability of the schedule to all of our users - even when they are on the road has made everyone's job easier. It was quickly adopted - even by the technophobes in our company - as it was so intuitive.
Gives a great 'at-a-glance' view of everything we have coming up an the reporting options are great too.
Minpunten
It would be nice to be able to have a 'confirmed/unconfirmed' option (or something similar but, in the meantime, we have workarounds.
I love Resource Guru. It's the only thing that's shifted our capacity management into a new gear. By which I mean: No more trying to manage everything from a single calendar, complete visibility over workflow and appointments, and the ability to see at a glance how much time is available on any given day.
Pluspunten
1. It doesn't try to do anything other than what it's best for
2. Calendar sync
3. Cost-effectiveness
4. Responsiveness of the support team (including on UX suggestions! Amazing.)
5. The little guru on the dashboard. Yeah it's cosmetic but it makes me feel good every time I log in.
6. Easy to set up and use.
Minpunten
The only things I really dislike a cosmetic and non-fatal. They are:
1. The inability to hit a "today" button to go back to today's date, and the thin scrollbars right and left
2. The fact that I have to literally click and drag events to create instances on non-consecutive days, rather than selecting dates.
Hi Leticia
Thanks for the great feedback :) I hope you'll be pleased to learn that we definitely do have a "Today" button which takes you straight back to today's date. It's in the top left of the schedule, next to where you navigate between different months and years.
I hope this helps! If there's anything else we can do for you please just let us know.
Happy scheduling!
Kat
Everyone has access to the schedule so each developer or designer not only knows what they're supposed to be working on, but what others are working on. We can schedule months into the future which helps us as we have projects that last months, not weeks.
Pluspunten
It's easy to use. Everyone can see what's on the schedule or what they are supposed to be working on. I can see how long a project is in our production queue to ascertain when we'll be finished. I can schedule vacations so others know which resources are available on which date.
Minpunten
The times are sometimes not correct. It seems to think a work day is twelve hours long, instead of eight. It's hard to schedule several projects in the same day. It's easiest to assign a project for the whole day.
Hi Nancy - thanks for your review. I just wanted to question a couple of things you wrote in the Cons section. You said the times are sometimes not correct - I'd love it if you can send us an example so we can troubleshoot it for you - we are not aware of this happening to any of our customers.
You also said, "It seems to think a work day is twelve hours long". I'm not sure where you see this info - it would be good to assist you further with this. By default a day is 8h long, but Normal Availability is totally customisable at a resource level - this is actually a feature we have that other products we've reviewed don't.
Finally you said, "It's hard to schedule several projects in the same day". Again, this is a limitation we found in other products which is why we made it easy to create as many bookings as you liked in a day - to a very granular level eg for as little as 1 minute.
Would love to hear from you ..
Best, Percy
Resource Guru allows our company to do long-term high level planning of resource utilisation and provide a guide lead time for sales teams.
Pluspunten
I've been using Resource Guru since 2013 and it's constantly improving which is good to see. It's easy to use and provides decent reporting.
Minpunten
I'd like to see public holidays auto populated according to a country of choice and ability to limit daily bookable hours just by a number (e.g. 7.5h) without setting a rigid start / end / lunch break.
Excellent. All our interactions with the team have been fast and successful. They clearly love the product and the work they do.
Pluspunten
It's fast and intuitive and I am able to see at a glance and report on all of my team's assignments and accurately schedule all their time.
Minpunten
Reporting aspect. Stock reports are good, but would like to be able to drag them into a platform like PowerBI. Potentially via scheduled export to CSV or similar. Would also like some more customisation such as more leave types and an option to backup and restore information. Finally, audit tracking - who made what change.
With many staff members doing field work, Resource Guru helps greatly with schedule planning and tracking where staff are at any given time.
Pluspunten
This software is easy to learn and use. We can see the availability of resources at a glance, and it's simple to make any edits to current entries as needed. The option to add personal photos for resources is fun to use and adds a bit of personalization to each resource.
Minpunten
When choosing a date to enter information, we need to scroll over the calendar instead of clicking, because clicking on dates will automatically trigger a window for entering new information.
Excellent. It has been a fantastic tool for our lean, high-performance business.
Pluspunten
Intuitive, easy to use, efficient. Simplified our weekly and monthly production planning radically, allowing us to focus more effort on forecasting production load, maintaining workload balance and ensuring good capacity to execute our projects.
Minpunten
Doesn't yet have the ability to set recurring events. Drag and drop functions are sometimes unstable, particularly with cloud syncing.
Overall the solution is very robust and solid at what it does. It has been used for over 5+ years and does it job well. I would like to see a bit more is product feature evolution in terms of workflow management/triggers as mentioned.
Pluspunten
The filtering capabilities allows different user roles to manage their teams easily and also find relevant skills in the agency. Many people have hidden skills and talents and having them searchable allows us to tap into these.
Minpunten
I would like to see more API integration efforts made into other applications.
I would like to see workflow triggers to handle people picking up work (validation) or not picking up work because they haven't been briefed in (trigger notification to manager) to help actually manage the validation of the acceptable of work by the individuals instead of having to follow up. This would remove a lot of chasing and admin.
Pluspunten
This program has been a vital part of out organization. I use this every day to schedule all of our resources for all of our projects and even PTO. We then download this information and use it to help forecast our revenue. It is incredibly easy to use and manipulate. The Beta is amazing!
Minpunten
I would like it if you could add a rate to each booking. That would make it easier to forecast revenue. Other than that, the product is great!
Overall Resource Guru has significantly contributed to our ability to schedule, review and plan our resources. We have increased our overall utilization of resources by using this product.
Pluspunten
We like the ability to visualize our employee utilization on a company-wide basis while being able to generate other utilization views by department and resource type. This helps us determine any utilization gaps and plan for cross utilization to ensure overall high utilization of our resources.
Minpunten
I would like to see a few more customization features for how the system currently treats over-bookings. We would like to be able to over-book resources and it show their utilization at 100%+ rather than it showing the conflict and a lower utilization until the over-allocation is corrected.
Pluspunten
That you can easily move jobs around if they need to change and can book off holiday time and meeting time so that you don't overbook yourself.
Minpunten
The waiting time bit could be better if time is overbooked - doesn't allow for different lengths of working days.
Hi Nikki,
Thanks for sharing your review of Resource Guru! I wanted to let you know that you can most definitely customise the availability of each of your resources on a daily basis - not every day has to have the same availability.
You can set resources normal availability (which is the availability which repeats on a weekly basis) and you can also create availability exceptions if you need to make a temporary change to someone's normal availability.
You might find this article on resource availability useful https://help.resourceguruapp.com/customer/portal/articles/2162590
I hope this helps, but please get in touch if you have any questions. We're always happy to help!
Thanks,
Kat
Resource Guru helps our agency see availability of resources to ensure we are allocating projects efficiently. Without it, we were running blindly and were hoping that team members would speak up when they were too busy or too idle. Now, we can see this ourselves (days in advance) and prevent talented employees from going unused.
Pluspunten
- Color coding clients
- Being able to manually adjust hours/availability per resource
- Limiting permissions per user
- Adding in when employees are OOO
- Search feature to check skill sets and who has worked on which client before
- Saving searches so we can quickly view groupings of employees
Minpunten
- I wish there was a way to search bookings for key words
- It's unfortunate that this tool doesn't link up with our PM tool, Asana
- There's no 'undo' button if you accidentally click and drag a booking unknowingly
We are now able to track all of the resources within our department and run metrics on what is being worked on and what our utilisation is across IT. We also use this as a recharging model to our businesses so this is a vital piece of software.
Pluspunten
The software is an easy to use format with searchable features and the ability to track personal from their actual hours work to the forecast showing future demand. The ability to allow resources to book against multiple codes and be organised in multiple teams means that reporting from the tool provides vital details for our KPI's and metrics, helping drive improvements and efficiencies within our organisation
Minpunten
There is a limited pipeline of change and growth of the software, which does not allow development in areas that would be useful to our company.
Provided visibility and allowed tracking of the team members, contract end dates and the ability to generate accurate invoices for the customer
Pluspunten
The product is easy to use and allows the administrator to manage teams, plan and review previous activities.
It can be used for recording or planning and gives a level of visibility that is lacking in a number of products.
Although the team are constantly looking at ways to improve the product, it never strays away from its core and prime functionality. Many products try to grow into a bigger, wider space and lose the key elements that attracted customers to the product in the first place.
A customer of ours was so impressed with the product that they too purchased it after seeing the value it afforded us.
Minpunten
It would be great if there was an App which could be opened rather than a web browser, although this is only a minor consideration with the number of browsers out there.
We have a number of delivery teams spread throughout Australia, and these act in remote locations, and in overlapping areas of interest.
Resource Guru gave us quick and easy ways to see who is available, who is not, and to see teams (location or project based) and be able to plan our people.
Pluspunten
Ready accessibility in both the field and the office without needing setup on the device.
Clear interface.
Simple filtering of team records to be able to determine resourcing constraints, etc.
Minpunten
On occasion, it becomes difficult to determine where work is on site or off, or whether a planned consulting visit is a firm date, or a flexible date. This could be down to how we are using it, though.
Pluspunten
The tool really makes time management easy and extremely visual. It does away with ugly excel spreadsheets and with a neat UX, it allows for easy time forecasting whilst also enabling you to easily keep on top of your time expenditure! I genuinely love this tool.
Along with the tool, where there are areas for improvement, the development team are happy to listen and actually make changes based on feedback! I've provided feedback with a couple of times and both have been integrated into future updates - this is a company that listens and constantly develops for the users' needs.
Minpunten
Very difficult to outline any main cons, as like I said above, any issues I've had with the tool historically, they've been resolved!
If I HAD to provide one, it'll be how the tool works across different devices. It's not especially mobile friendly...but that's me scraping the barrel for a con.
Pluspunten
I love the ease of use and functionality to add and change bookings.
Minpunten
I'd like that their is an app version to make navigation on a mobile a bit easier.
At any time the producers and project managers have a full overview of what the creative team is up to, if they have time to work on other projects and their availability. it is easy to work with for top line planning and for in-detail remarks or instructions. As you can limit the workdays to 8 hours it becomes quicky apparent if additional resources are needed as you create "on hold" projects.
Pluspunten
it is easy to plan projects and see what every team member is working on, when holidays are happening and their general availability. No more questioning what they should be working on when their project manager is not around.
Minpunten
it suits the purpose I have for it, but it would be great if you would be able to archive non-active projects easier than handling them one by one.
Please see why did you make the switch
Pluspunten
-East to use
-Visually pleasant
-Free
-Versatile (eg. can add time off and shows in different colour)
Minpunten
I did not really find any cons with Resource Guru. However, perhaps it would be nice to have an option of integrating with Microsoft Outlook?
Pluspunten
I like how easy it is to track my schedule, my colleagues schedules, and our communal equipment.
Minpunten
I dislike getting the email with my daily schedule at midnight. I'm not sure if this is a company setting, or if the email could be moved to a more useful time or cancelled completely. It would be helpful to get an email if your schedule has been changed for the next 48 hours or similar.
Hi Rachel
Thanks for your feedback! We do have plans to let you change the time of the daily schedule email in future, but in the meantime if you'd prefer to turn it off you can do this in your Settings by following the walkthrough here https://help.resourceguruapp.com/en/articles/2942114-switching-off-daily-schedule-email-notifications
I hope this helps, but please let me know if there's anything else I can do for you. I'm always happy to help!
Thanks,
Kat
Love the product but would like to see some more detail in the functionality
Pluspunten
how it looks in calendar view, the simple drag and drop of booking.
Minpunten
would like the option to customise the order of appearance (ie drag and drop). it also desperately needs an App! Could also do with the ability to customise the height of the rows so you can fit more in one view (I have 48 people I need a birds eye view of and the row height is a bit of a waste of space). Also the dashboard doesn't have wait list on it which is a pain for users. The reports are a it archaic as well so would like some more options there.
Resource Guru has allowed us to keep track of many, many freelancers and zero hours staffs availability over a number of projects across different business divisions. This allows us to share staff easier and takes work out of scheduling and at times saves us hiring and instead lets us give others new opportunities
Pluspunten
Recently my favourite feature has been the ability to organise groups of people into teams. It really helps with quickly identifying shifts and availability in mine and others teams.
Minpunten
Our issue is the time availability settings. Our work is set across multiple projects that have ever changing start times outside of the'9-5'. Since we mainly use it for operational shifting rather than day to day planning, we have to set everybody as available 12 am to 12pm everyday.
Very good and wasy
Pluspunten
The scheduling look with the bar graphs.
Minpunten
Capacity is tough to really gage what is happening from a project level.
Pluspunten
It's online, live, easy to use and easy to update, GUI is nice, all information is easy in a GANTT style.
Minpunten
Not available on a phone!!! Needs an app, some copy paste/duplicate features could be added. Should sync better to iCal and be updatable from iCal to RG.
Hi Nil
Thanks for sharing your review of Resource Guru! I wanted to let you know that you can most definitely copy and paste in Resource Guru - just use SHIFT+drag. You'll find a demonstration of this and other handy tips in our Help Center here: https://help.resourceguruapp.com/customer/en/portal/topics/839971-little-tips/articles
I also wanted to let you know that dedicated mobile apps and two way calendar sync are firmly on our roadmap :)
Thanks again, and please don't be a stranger if there's anything we can do to help!
Kat
It provides a birds eye view of our capabilities, quickly proving our team with the information required to manage the bookings for everyone of our 60 Devs.
Pluspunten
That it does exactly what it should. No complex features such as budgets or projects.
Minpunten
We were hesitant at first because of the pricing but after using it for a few months we realized that it became a most for our Staff Augmentation business model. Our Capabilities team couldn’t survive a day without it.
Friendly staff, and very quick response time.