Case background
Myke Great is the owner of a small construction company, GreatBuilds. The company has several departments, each with its own manager.
Each department works on different areas of construction. In each team, there are a number of employees who are deployed (generally in pairs) to work on client projects.
Myke needs a system that allows
- his department managers to schedule and assign jobs to their crews
- all the crew members to know what jobs they’ve been allocated and where they are. They also need to have access to all relevant information about the job while on the road
- the senior management to have oversight on the entire operation
The challenge
1. The needs of the department managers
James is the manager of the concrete crew. He has 10 members in his team. He needs a way to:
- assign his team to different jobs
- attach relevant documents to each appointment (for example, “Blue chandelier in the master bedroom for JOB 12345”)
- filter jobs so he can see which member of his team is working where
- see where everyone is deployed on a daily and weekly basis to make sure he’s optimally allocated his team
- see what has occurred in the past, how busy the team is, and what’s coming up in the future
- know who is working and where so if he needs to make changes, no job is left short staffed
- quickly and easily update the schedule
2. The needs of the crew
Tim Smith and Joe Harrison are members of the concrete crew.
They need to know where they’re working at any given time and on what. They also need to know whether there’s any additional information needed to complete the job.
They also need to be able to add comments and attachments to jobs with the results of their work – pictures, notes, etc. to show that they were there, what they encountered, and what they did. This is later used as part of the company’s record keeping.
Tim and seven others work just in the concrete department, while Joe and another colleague are skilled to also work in the drywall department.
3. The needs of the management team
Antonio is a member of GreatBuilds’ management team. He needs to keep track of work that’s been done, and have oversight on any future work. As he’s in charge of customer service and feedback, it’s also important that he knows exactly what’s happened at each job and what (if any) the next steps are. He needs to be able to “filter” the calendars by client, job or account id, as well as keywords.
Erika is GreatBuilds’ HR manager. She needs to have access to all the appointment records (and any attachments). They are used as a record of which employees were working and what they were working on.
Members of the management usually do not need to modify the calendar. They do need to be able to scroll or switch easily to drill into invidividual jobs or view the big picture of the calendar.
The Teamup Solution
All members of the GreatBuilds team need a scheduling tool that allows a lot of detailed information with different accesses for different people.
Myke realised that a Teamup calendar would help him achieve his goals and deliver a calendar that worked for all his team.
Setup and administration
Sub-calendars
Each department is given its own folder, with sub-calendars for team member nested within the folder.
If one of the team works in multiple departments (e.g., painting and electricity) their jobs would be color coded acccording for the respective department they work for.
There’s a separate “projects” folder that holds all the information on each individual client or project.
All the team’s individual calendars are set up to disallow overlapping events – this prevents anyone being double booked .
Access links
Sharing the Teamup Calendar among staff users is by means of calendar links. Each member of the team is given their own personal link to their calendar. The calendar administrator can set different combinations of access permissions for the calendars, depending on who the calendar is for.
For example:
- Myke (owner) or his director of operations: administrator with full rights to manage the entire calendar, including access to Settings
- James (department manager): modify events on all his team calendars but no access to other departments
- Erika (HR): read only (she can view all calendar events and details but can’t make changes)
- Antonio (management team): add only (he can add new appointments but can’t modify any existing events)
- Tim (concrete crew): Modify-from-same-link (he can add details to jobs he’s been assigned to but can’t change anything else)
Calendar Views
Teamup supports nine different ways to view calendars plus countless ways of filtering calendar information.
Myke has set a default 4-week view. However, if any member of his team wants to change this, all they need to do is a click on the “view” tab or add link parameters to the calendar’s url.
The calendar in practice
Entering jobs
It is important that the department manager assigns each job to one or more crew members and a project. If someone like Joe who works for multiple departments, the job needs to be assigned to his calendar (folder level) and one of the departments in the folder in order to ensure Joe will not be double booked.
To make sure the management team can filter appointments by job number, the department managers need to enter the job number in the event consistently, for example, in the title .
Below are some example views for the different roles. Click the image to make it full screen.