Managing Resources with Excel Spreadsheets

Many organizations use Excel spreadsheets to manage resources across their project and services workload. This is fine for small departments, but as the resource pool grows in size, spreadsheets quickly become difficult to maintain and fail to provide the complete picture.

In this situation, Innate is the next logical step. With a web base spreadsheet interface to a SQL Server or Oracle database, it can rapidly convert your Excel spreadsheets into a robust, multi-user operational system.

Innate's Web Based Spreadsheet

With a similar look and feel to Excel, Innate’s spreadsheet is specifically designed for time based data. At a single click you can:

• Change the displayed timescale between days, weeks, months and quarters
• Change the units of work between full time equivalents, days or hours
• Summarize or drill down a simple work breakdown structure, to show work profiles at project, phase or task level
• Switch to a Gantt chart view so that chunks of work can easily moved in time. The effect on resource bottlenecks is shown dynamically

It is a multi-user system with a comprehensive permission system. The impact of a single change can easily be seen by everyone who needs to know, yet 'who can change what' is easily controlled. Reporting can be deployed separately from the spreadsheet, further protecting the integrity of the data.

The screenshot below shows a spreadsheet view of planned work. It can be converted into a Gantt chart with a single click so that chunks of work can easily be moved to rebalance the workload.

The sub totals show the bottlenecks and spare capacity by skill, team etc. These update dynamically as work profiles are changed. There are comprehensive controls over the spreadsheet layout and the levels of detail that you want to see.

Resource Management Functions

Because Innate’s resource management spreadsheet’s look and feel is similar to Excel, it is readily accepted by the user community, speeding up implementation and reducing the payback time.

Extensive functionality for managing resources is provided, so that:

• Each user has a tailored home page showing up-to-date key data
• You can check capacity for new work by skill group and individual resource
• Where the workload needs rebalancing you can try different scenarios without affecting the live data
• You can assign staff based on multiple skills and availability
• Web based reports access the data directly to effectively communicate the impact of changes as they occur