Skip to main content

Two ways to plan

Planning is not one activity. Dime.Scheduler answers two quite different questions, and almost everything else about the product makes more sense once you know which one you are asking.

Scheduling resources​

The first question is who is doing what, and when.

A service company has forty engineers and two hundred jobs a week. Each job needs somebody with the right skills, near enough to get there, with a gap in their day. The work arrives as discrete, mostly independent pieces. It is urgent, it churns constantly, and a plan made on Monday looks different by Tuesday afternoon.

Here the unit that matters is the appointmentAppointmentA task scheduled to a resource for a specific period - the scheduled instance you see on the planning board.: this resourceResourceAn entity that can carry out work - a person, vehicle, tool, or room - that you schedule on the planning board., this taskTaskA unit of work that belongs to a job. It appears in the open task list until it is scheduled to a resource., this slot in the day. Planning means getting work onto people, and the skill is in fitting a lot of pieces into a finite number of hours without breaking a promise to a customer.

The planning boardPlanning boardThe main graphical scheduling surface where dispatchers drag tasks onto resources across a timeline. is the surface for this, with open tasks feeding it, the map answering "who is near", and capacityCapacityThe amount of working time a resource has available in a given period, used to spot over- and under-planning. answering "who has room".

Planning projects​

The second question is whether this body of work is going to land.

A factory fit-out runs from March to September. It has a budget, a team, a sequence that cannot be reordered freely, and a date somebody has committed to. The work is not independent pieces: the electrical phase cannot start before the groundwork finishes, and if commissioning slips, everything behind it slips too.

Here the unit that matters is the project as a whole. Every individual week of that fit-out can look perfectly healthy on the board - people booked, nothing clashing, days full - while the project is quietly in trouble. Two thirds of the electrical budget is gone with a third of the work done. The commissioning engineer is committed elsewhere in August. The plan has drifted five weeks past what was agreed in February. None of those are visible in a day.

So the questions become aggregate ones: how much of this is planned, how much budget is left, which tasks are in trouble, how far has the whole thing moved. That is what the project planning pages are for.

They are not alternatives​

Most organizations do both, and the product does not ask you to choose.

The two angles are views of the same data, not separate systems. A project taskTaskA unit of work that belongs to a job. It appears in the open task list until it is scheduled to a resource. that gets planned becomes an appointment on somebody's board, exactly like any other. Progress reported against that appointment shows up in the project. The resourcesResourceAn entity that can carry out work - a person, vehicle, tool, or room - that you schedule on the planning board., calendars, skills, categories and security that govern one govern the other, because there is only one set of them.

What differs is the altitude you look from. A dispatcher spends the day in the board. A project manager spends it in the portfolio. Both are looking at the same underlying plan.

Which one are you doing?​

A rough test, and it is about how work arrives rather than about your industry:

  • Work arrives as individual jobs to be assigned - service calls, deliveries, installations, maintenance visits. That is resource scheduling. Start with resource scheduling.
  • Work arrives as a body of work with a budget and a deadline - a build, a rollout, a program with phases. That is project planning. Start with project planning.
  • Both, which is the common case. A contractor runs long projects and still dispatches emergency call-outs. Use both, and expect the same resources to appear in each.

If you are unsure, it is worth noticing that the project angle only pays for itself when the work has a shape worth tracking: dependencies, a budget, a baseline to slip against. Work that is simply a queue of jobs is better served by the board alone, and dressing it up as a project adds bookkeeping without adding insight.

In this section​

Both angles live here, along with the things that serve them equally: getting the plan in front of people who need it, and the two ways to have work planned for you rather than by you. The pages for the people on the receiving end of the plan, their own schedule, tasks and time, are in Do the work.

New to Dime.Scheduler?

How it works covers the design philosophy and the key terms used throughout these manuals.

Last updated on by Hendrik Bulens