Resource Guru

Simplicity and focus. Resource Guru solves one problem, a problem that is key to our business - which is project resource assignment and scheduling. It does it quickly, and easily. Our prior tool required us to understand a complex CRM system with multiple interrelated functions. Resource Guru gives us the availability, assignment and schedule tools we need to deliver our projects without needless overhead.

I would like more user defined fields when we assign a resource to a project. We assign a project sales phase type to each project, and we assign an individual billing rate to each resource, which can be different for each day of the project. We currently do that using a strict taxonomy in the "Notes" field and them use an Excel macro to parse that information out for sales and revue forecasting. While this doe take a bit of management and programming magic - it is still orders fo magnitude less complicated that it was previously when we managed this data in our CRM system. Having those filed would just make our lives all that much simpler.

Resource Guru is a very clean-looking software that provides an ease of use unlike I've seen in other products. No training was required to bring my team online with the software, much of it is intuitive. I appreciate the professional look and feel as well as the simplistic interface. Filtering is something that is crucial to our business, and while I love the functionality of it there is definitely room for improvement. Through implementing small workarounds we were able to bring this software online for a team of over 100 field service engineers with very short turnaround (less than three weeks of overlap between the old software and Resource Guru).

While Resource Guru provides a clean and simple software, at times I find it too simple. There are some features that are built in some places but not others. For example I have the option of custom tags for filtering Resources. I can build out a filter for region, city, desired schedule, skillets, or even favorite food if I want to. However, none of this applies to Projects. I would love to be able to filter projects by region, city, state, or custom tags like skillset and software required. It seems to me that the exact same functionality could be copied and pasted over to Projects.

There are other minor tweaks to be made, like exiting a window. Sometimes I am met with an "are you sure you want to exit" window because I'm currently editing something, but more often than not I am allowed to simply click outside the window or hit escape and all of the editing in progress is lost.

Furthermore, it would be nice to be able to input repeating holidays or events. For example, New Year's Day is always on January 1st. Why do I have to scroll forward and manually input this holiday every year? It would be great to just set it and forget it.

Another addition I would love to see is the ability to mark jobs/projects as tentative or unconfirmed. This could be in the form of a checkbox that adds a gradient to the job so it looks different than the rest. Something simple to differentiate it from confirmed projects is all I'm looking for.

I like the appearance of the software - its clear, self explanatory, easy to navigate, see the bigger picture to jiggle schedule resource about, etc.

I like how easy and quickly the support team are there to assist when needed.

I like how it shows you who has booked what and the daily reminders via email of what is coming up, etc.

It isn't a negative but I would like to have a scheduling log, to see at what time and date did someone book a slot onto the schedule. I manage the Creative Studio, depending how many campaigns and the urgency in hitting these deadlines, I need to keep track of the entire departments availability, knowing when i can move things around in order to deliver last min projects. Only myself should have booking access, but I currently share it with Creative Directors, so they can schedule in my absence, but I can't see when they have booked them in so i can keep track. Is this something you could implement, please? Thanks,

1. It doesn't try to do anything other than what it's best for
2. Calendar sync
3. Cost-effectiveness
4. Responsiveness of the support team (including on UX suggestions! Amazing.)
5. The little guru on the dashboard. Yeah it's cosmetic but it makes me feel good every time I log in.
6. Easy to set up and use.

The only things I really dislike a cosmetic and non-fatal. They are:
1. The inability to hit a "today" button to go back to today's date, and the thin scrollbars right and left
2. The fact that I have to literally click and drag events to create instances on non-consecutive days, rather than selecting dates.