workforce planning possible?

I’d like functionality like this too, but it doesn’t currently exist in Harvest, to the best of my knowledge.

I’d like a feature where engineers would be able to estimate which projects they are going to be working on in advance of the work — sort of like filling out an estimated timesheet in advance. Basically, we need to be able to figure out who has availability and make estimates about revenue and when to start filling our sales pipeline. Adding the distinction of treating contractors differently (in terms of their availability to work) would be awesome, too.

Christopher: I can’t speak for ediligent, but I’ll fill you in on some of the things I think I’d like to see.

Availability
For employees and contractors we need a way to define their availability to do work. I’d like this to be in terms of each week in the calendar, meaning an editable number of working hours for each week in the calendar. I think that keeps it pretty simple (we tend to already speak in terms of “hours per week”, availability — for example: “next week, I’ll be available for 20 hours, but I can commit to 32 the following week”). Each employee and contractor would be responsible for editing their availability in the calendar, probably three months into the future (and maybe have some default availability that’s assumed).

Allocation (Assignment)
I want employees and contractors to specify which projects they intend to work on in the future (and I want the ability, as a manager, to edit/assign their allocation). This is what I meant by “it’s like filling out their timesheet in advance”.

Resource Planning
At a high level, I want to be able to monitor the gap in availability vs. assignment. You can think of this like inventory management — availability is inventory and assignment is orders. Our consulting sales process needs this in order to know whether we need to start getting more projects into the pipe.

Employee Accountability
We want to be able monitor the gap, for each employee, between their allocation and their actual work output. For example, if they commit to working billable 32 hours and they are only putting in 20, then that’s a problem (since we were made a forecast of our revenue, and budgeting decisions, based on 32 hours).

Our needs for this feature are basic but essential. We need a dead-easy calendar availability system where our freelancers can mark days they are available or unavailable.

This alone would solve 90% of our scheduling problems and would dramatically improve our planning and productivity. Later, we would also like to be able to indicate partial/hourly availabilities.

Let me know if anything like this is in the works, as we are currently searching for a solution and it would be brilliant as part of Harvest.

I need more ‘resource planning’ capabilities - in harvest :) — and am really interested in this as well. Any concrete plans to build something like this?

Hi Jim (Kring)
I am looking for a system which does all the things you mentioned (7 Dec 10). Did you have any luck finding one which works and is pretty low maintenance to operate?
We have a small team of consultants and need to schedule billable and non-billable time and forecast availability for work and not over-allocate staff etc.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kathryn (working in UK, hope to report on good system on Monday morning!)