Resource calendars are an important part of project management and a project artifact. Scheduling the resources, or people, needed to complete a project can be challenging, especially when multiple projects and resources are involved.
Resource calendars help you stay on track by identifying all the resources required for each stage of your project so you can monitor resource availability and avoid scheduling conflicts.
What is a Resource Calendar?
Project resource calendar is a tool that shows when resources are available during a week or month. For example, if your team only has three developers who can work on a project and they're all working 8 hours per day, 5 days per week; then you have 32 hours of resource availability each day.
However, if one developer is out on vacation and another has a wedding anniversary dinner; then you have only 16 hours of resource availability in that day. Resource calendar provides information about upcoming vacations and other events so managers know what to expect before creating new projects and assigning people to them.
As we are aiming to help clients drive better productivity, ensure real-time visibility into assigned tasks for increased transparency, reduce time-to-value and increase financial ROI by eliminating loss due to understaffing. This way, It is easy to identify unavailable times for scheduling.
Why Use a Resource Calendar?
Resource calendars aren’t just another layer of documentation—they’re a way to improve your team’s communication about their workload and enable a higher level of cooperation between stakeholders.
By using resource calendars, you can be sure that everyone on your team is up-to-date with who has time to take on which tasks. Project managers are focused on timelines and deadlines; when something isn’t getting done quickly enough, it may help to know why certain individuals are overloaded or if some people are consistently underutilized. A calendar is one way to answer these questions.
Resource calendars are recommended to be used in requirements elicitation, development of project schedule, developing project team and optimizing risk responses.
How to Create a Resource Calendar?
There are a number of free resources available online that will help you create your first resource calendar, whether it’s based on Microsoft Project, Apple iCal or Google Calendar. To create your first basic resource calendar we recommended this guided project of Coursera. Completing guided projects give a valued experience to users for a low price.