Booking clashes, the waiting list, overtime and capacity planning
Resource Guru features a clash management engine that prevents overbookings. This can be very useful for capacity planning and helps to identify overloaded resources when demand outstrips availability.
If a resource does not have sufficient availability for the booking you’re trying to make, you'll see a Booking Clash with two options—Add With Overtime and Add to Waiting List.
The Waiting List
Bookings on the Waiting List are unconfirmed bookings. This means that the resource in question doesn’t currently have enough availability to accommodate the booking. So, the booking either needs to move to another date, another resource or it needs to be reduced to a point where it fits within the availability.
Bookings on the Waiting List are easy to spot—you’ll see diagonal lines on the booking itself and a red background to indicate that they are unconfirmed bookings that need to be resolved.
Your own Waiting List bookings will also appear on your Dashboard as a reminder that you need to resolve them. These bookings won’t appear on the Dashboard of the person you’re trying to book.
The Waiting List is a great way to plan work even when there’s not enough availability and identify availability problems well ahead of time.
Elastic overtime
Add With Overtime automatically extends a resource’s availability and flags the extra hours as overtime.
You can usually identify overtime by a red bar that appears on the Availability Bar along with a red background on the date. You can view overtime details by hovering over or clicking on the Availability Bar.
Any availability which is added automatically is elastic, meaning that it is automagically ✨removed if time becomes available again. For example, by deleting or moving a booking.
Overtime can also be added or removed manually by dragging the slider in the popover on the Availability Bar. Please note that only booked time can be flagged as overtime.
All overtime appears in the Reports, allowing you to keep track of who’s overloaded and where you have insufficient resources. Tracking overtime in this way helps you maintain a healthy, happy workplace 🙂.
Capacity planning
You can use the Waiting List and overtime for capacity planning by identifying areas where demand outstrips availability.
Simply visit Reports and sort the resource list by the Waiting List or Overtime column. With this enhanced visibility, you can identify areas where you need to take corrective action, i.e., by hiring freelancers or adjusting project schedules to match resource availability.
Use Filters to do capacity planning for specific groups of resources.
Adding bookings on weekends or other non-working days
There are times when working on a weekend is simply unavoidable. Plans sometimes go haywire and deadlines need to be met. So, we’ve made it easy to allocate work to people on non-working days.
When you add the booking, you will see options to either add the booking to the Waiting List or add it with overtime.
If work added on a weekend is not considered to be overtime, you can simply remove it with the slider.
If you create a booking which starts or ends on a non-working day and spans multiple non-working days, bookings on all of the non-working days will be added with overtime or to the Waiting list, depending on the option you choose.
We would urge you to track overtime where appropriate to ensure colleagues aren’t being overworked.
Please use this feature wisely!
Guru Tip
You will see a Booking Clash warning if you attempt to make a time-specific booking (e.g. 9 am–3 pm) that spans a resource’s break—for example “Lunch from 1–2 pm.” To prevent this, either adjust the booking to avoid the break times or make a duration booking instead (e.g., 6h).
Creating bookings outside of a project start or end date
When you create a booking either before the start date or after the end date of the assigned project, a Booking Clash warning will appear. This warning informs you that confirming the booking will update the project's start or end date accordingly.
If you have the sufficient permissions, you can confirm the booking and the project’s start and end dates will be updated automatically.