Here, we will get an in depth look at how to navigate the Dashboard View, and how to use the Workforce Planner in Thunderbolt Pipeline. We will also go over a few examples to explain the Workforce feature step-by-step!
Workforce Planning
Thunderbolt Pipeline includes a high level Workforce Planning tool meant to capture your workforce needs across all projects. This is completed on individual projects under the Current View. The Dashboard also contains a Workforce Planning view that shows all current projects in progress. This is useful for gaining insight on labor needs across all projects in the company.
Workforce Planning from Thunderbolt Innovation on Vimeo.
- Go to the 'Current' View
- The red gear icon in the table shows that no workforce has been created
- To add workforce to a project, click the red gear
- The workforce planning tool will display a row for each phase. and the months for the entire project.
- Select ‘Edit’
- For each phase, you will enter:
- The start and end date
- The budget
- Click ‘Save’
- The First time you click save, the workforce plan will be automatically generated. If you make changes to these numbers in the future, you will need to click 'Autofill' to update the tables.
- The first row under the phase represents the monthly budget, and the second represents the number of man-months needed during that time.
- After you have filled out that information, in the 'Current' view, you will see a Data Icon and a Graph Icon next to the project. This means that workforce has been created for this project.
- The Data Icon will bring you back to the page you just filled out. Here, you can edit the budget and timing for phases on your project, or delete the Workforce by clicking ‘Clear’
- The Graph Icon will give you a month by month view of that project and the number of resources you have per project at any given time.
- Using Workforce in the Dashboard View will give you a look at all working projects in the company. This will be useful to obtain a full spectrum view of the company’s needs over a large span of time. We will go into more depth on this in the video below.
We have some exciting updates as of 2/1/2018. See the new way to create a workforce plan from scratch and how to add and remove phases from existing workforce plans in the following two videos.
Adding a Workforce Plan
Add and Removing Phases to an existing Workforce Plan
The following is a situation to explain more about Workforce and how it can help your business!
In January of 2018 there are 23 working days, not including weekends. If 1 person works every day for 8 hours a day, the number of hours they worked in January would be 184 hours. So, when you see a 1 for the number of resources in January 2018 for your workforce planning this means there are 184 hours of work to be done. If you see a 2.5, for example, this means that there are 460 hours.
Understand that a 1 in January 2018 does not mean the same number of hours for February of 2018. In February of 2018, there are 20 work days. If that same person worked 20 days 8 hours each day, there would be 160 hours of work.
This is where the magic happens to make your life easier. Thunderbolt Pipeline uses an algorithm to automatically spreads the labor evenly across the time frames you set for each phase. To find the hours of labor for each phase, we divide the budget for the phase by the rate. This gives us the total hours of work in each phase. You recall earlier that 1 resource for January 2018 isn’t the same hours as 1 resource in February 2018. We calculate the number of workdays in each month based on your start and end dates for the phase.
After you've entered the workforce plan for all of your awarded projects you can visit the dashboard to see the overall labor needs for your company. In this view the number represents the count of labor in each month needed, where as in the individual projects a .5 would represent 1 laborer working for 1/2 the month on one project and in the other project they were assigned to they would also be represented by a .5. You wouldn't adjust the individual project to be a 1 to represent that single laborer otherwise you would double count them in the Dashboard view.
If you would like to sign up for a 1-1 webinar to explain how this works in your company please reach out to us either through the Support button in the application or by emailing support@thunderboltinnovation.com. All 1-1 webinar sessions are included in your subscription. We want you to be successful!
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