Resource scheduling: a simple & practical 5-step process

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Useful links to more resource scheduling and planning must-reads

• A tactical how-to guide to set up an accurate resource forecasting process
• The ultimate guide to all things resource planning, with steps to create a plan of your own
• A handpicked list of seven free resource planning templates to use right away
• Practical resource allocation tactics to deliver projects on time without causing burnout
• Resource loading best practices to keep team members’ utilization at healthy rates

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Raise your hand if you are:

• Confused about project timelines
• Unsure who is working on what 
• Swamped by too many priorities
• Worried about looming due dates

If your hand is up, you can put it back down for good: your job is about to get a lot less stressful. All you need is a better resource scheduling process—and this guide shows you how to make it happen.

What is resource scheduling?

Resource scheduling is a method of assigning the right people to projects and tasks within a specified timeframe. Part of the larger resource planning process, effective resource scheduling defines who needs to do what and by when, and makes this information available to everyone who needs it: team members, managers, stakeholders, and you—the designated people planner 📋

In this way, a resource schedule is your org’s central hub, where team members can go to get a broad overview of how everyone’s time is spent. This includes:

• What projects everyone is allocated to, and at what percentage of their time
• Which work is dependent on other allocations, affecting the overall project timeline
• Who is available and has the necessary skills to take on a new project

A schedule is not a disconnected spreadsheet, a series of Slack threads, a shared Google or Outlook calendar, or a list of tasks and due dates. 

It is something like this 👇

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Resource scheduling vs. resource allocation: what’s the difference?

Resource allocation involves assigning the right people to the right projects based on their skills and availability. It answers who will work on what 🙋

Resource scheduling focuses on timing, and organizing when this work will be done to ensure due dates are met and resources are not overbooked. It answers when the work will happen 📅

In other words: allocation is about matching your resource pool to specific tasks and projects, while scheduling is about timing.

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A real-life resource scheduling example: BuzzFeed

At digital media and entertainment company BuzzFeed, things move fast. Their agile production team creates a steady stream of quizzes, videos, and takes on pop culture, reaching millions of people daily. It’s no surprise teams juggle anywhere from 100 to 200 projects at a time—and scheduling resources is both an art and a science.

BuzzFeed’s post-production team is responsible for editing the raw footage that goes into producing its video content. Senior Director, Production Operations Leah Zeis uses the team’s resource management software, Float (that’s us!), for a shared, centralized view of important project data, like the overall project timeline and the deliverables.

As soon as a new project comes in, Zeis and the post-production team coordinators kick off resource allocation and scheduling in Float, so the team knows exactly what to expect in the upcoming weeks and months.

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Leah Zeis

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Senior Director, Production Operations at BuzzFeed

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It’s in Float that we start creating and assigning the editing tasks and resources to get the project delivered. We add information like the project due date and budget so that at a high level we can see what our resource capacity and availability is to schedule the right team for the job.

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Want to give Float a try? It’s free!

Managing resources is easier using Float’s visual schedule. It allows you to view color-coded tasks in flight with precise timelines, keeping you updated on both project and team progress.

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2 resource scheduling methods to optimize your team’s time

Because you’re managing people—and all the unpredictability that comes with them—resource scheduling is rarely smooth sailing. You’re dealing with considerations and unknowns like:

• Team members’ regional holidays and time off 
• Sick leave and parental leave
• Full-time or part-time employment statuses
• Existing allocations
• Current and forecasted resource demand
• Current vs. target billable resource utilization rates
• Team members’ skill sets, strengths, and interests
• Client budgets and expectations
• Project scopes, timelines, and due dates
• Task dependencies that may affect timelines

All these factors result in two common scenarios when scheduling project work: you either have too few hours or too few people to complete the project work. 

…Or do you? 🤨

Try the two methods below to make the most of what you have:

1. Time-constrained scheduling

Time-constrained scheduling is a method of scheduling your team’s time when you’re working within a fixed timeline, and the project delivery due date is non-negotiable. 

The approach focuses on completing a project within a specified time frame (for example, a landing page that an ecommerce marketing agency needs to complete the day before Black Friday), and involves adjusting resource allocations to meet the due date.

💡 Learn how to use the resource smoothing technique to complete projects on time

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📖 A real-world example: Toaster

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Lauren O’Halloran, Director of Production at creative agency Toaster, manages workloads for 100+ team members across four offices. 

To schedule resources efficiently, O’Halloran and her team have daily standups, where each person walks through their allocations for that day laid out on a Trello board, and weekly meetings, where they review longer-term allocations in Float. 

This allows them to identify team members who might be light on or overloaded with deadline-driven project work in the coming weeks, and reshuffle allocations or bring on additional resources as needed.

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2. Resource-constrained scheduling

Resource-constrained scheduling involves planning tasks within the limits of your team members’ capacity so you don’t overload them.

This type of scheduling helps you make the best use of your available people’s time without overworking them or missing the project due date. 

You could delay a project’s start date until more people are available, or stretch out the duration of tasks to give team members enough time to complete them. When employing this method, projects might last longer than you initially planned for.

💡 Learn how to use the resource leveling technique for managing resource constraints

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📖 A real-world example: Accounts and Legal

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The team of accountants, lawyers, and tax specialists from consulting firm Accounts and Legal deliver work under strict timelines—and that’s before taking into account the ad hoc, urgent tasks that pop up.

To prevent overallocation, they monitor capacity in monthly capacity planning sessions and daily check-ins, and hire new staff as soon as specific roles are consistently overbooked.

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How to do resource scheduling in 5 steps

A new project has fallen into your lap. Can you and your team make it happen within the client’s desired timeframe? Yes!—if you follow these five simple steps for effective resource scheduling, that is 😉

Step 1: input resource information in a shared resource scheduling tool 

Set up the information you have about your team in one central place—whether that’s a spreadsheet, a project management tool, or dedicated resource management or resource scheduling software.

Create profiles for each individual team member, and include information like:

• Standard work days and hours
• Location (for distributed teams)
• Planned vacations, regional holidays, and other scheduled time off
• Team members’ job titles and skills

During the resource scheduling process, team alignment is essential. Your database should be accessible to your entire organization, not just resource and capacity management teams, so everyone has real-time team member status at a glance.

Having all this information transparent helps you identify potential bottlenecks or shortages early and make more informed decisions about resource requirements, resource allocation, and project management.

Step 2: assess resource availability before assigning tasks

Assess the capacity and availability of resources during the project timeline. Obvious? Yes. Critically important? Also yes—which is why it’s still worth mentioning. 

Here are some things to look out for on your team’s shared schedule:

• Do any team members have regional holidays coming up?
• Is anyone taking their annual leave during the project’s duration?
• Are any team members overutilized or underallocated?

There will be times when the go-to team member for a particular project task or client will be unavailable. If you’re lucky, you’ll know about it weeks in advance—but often, resource availability can be unpredictable.

In this case, use your resource management tool to surface other team members with the necessary skills and availability to be scheduled on a particular project.

But why stop there? You can also filter team members by seniority, language proficiencies, location, or any other characteristic you may want to surface quickly.

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Comfort Agemo 

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Senior Capacity and Freelance Manager at Scholz & Friends

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In Float, you can just click to find a motion designer or a copywriter, and you have a list of everyone across all offices. 

You know who speaks English and who speaks Spanish, and you can quickly help out if someone is in need of a specific skill set.

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Step 3: allocate work and set timeframes

Now, it’s time to allocate team members to specific projects or individual project tasks. Consider each team member’s existing workload to ensure a balanced distribution that maximizes productivity (and profitability!) without overwhelming anyone.

Based on what you know from previous forecasts and historical data, set reasonable timeframes and durations—e.g. four hours daily for the next ten workdays, or a 100% resource utilization rate over the next three months. 

Be sure to factor in buffer time for unexpected delays or changes, and communicate these timeframes clearly with your team.

Ultimately, your goal should be to create a project schedule that’s both ambitious and achievable, so your team can deliver fantastic work and meet project deadlines consistently without risk of burnout.

Step 4: monitor allocations and adapt when necessary

Allocation isn’t a set-and-forget exercise. Project scopes change, availability fluctuates, and priorities shift. That’s why it’s crucial to continuously monitor for any changes in team availability and project timelines. 

Don’t make allocation decisions in a silo. Consider viewing allocations as a team in your resource management tool so any potential issues are spotted and ironed out immediately. 

If you’re using a tool like Float, you can even create saved views to share with stakeholders, so they can access the information they need faster.

Step 5: track the actual time spent on tasks and activities

Here’s a bonus step: keep a record of the number of people allocated to projects and the time taken to complete individual tasks. This data will help you refine your future resource schedules.

If your team uses time tracking, you can also see when a project is taking longer than expected by comparing actual logged hours with scheduled hours.

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Pro tip: set up time tracking in your resource scheduling software

Tracking time in the same place you have your resource schedule is a reliable way to record useful data for future projects. Access to this information in a single platform will help you refine your resource allocation, so you can meet due dates consistently and boost your team’s productivity sustainably.

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Finally, you can detect when your team’s time is being used inefficiently. In Float, this is done by tracking billable and non-billable spend against budgets you set—in hours or in fees—at the project, phase, and even individual task level. 

Why is resource scheduling important?

When we talk about ‘resources’, we’re really talking about people—and they’re the ones who benefit most from effective resource scheduling in three ways:

📋 1. Keeps everyone in the loop, saving time and reducing stress: when everyone knows exactly what they need to do and when, projects stay on track and your team has peace of mind. No more last-minute Slack messages asking who’s handling that urgent client website copy: it’s all laid out clearly, so everyone can focus on doing their work, and doing it well.

🎯 2. Empowers your team to excel by matching tasks with the right resources: assigning tasks to the most skilled team members available ensures your clients get top-notch deliverables every time. When people are working on projects that align with their strengths, the quality of work improves, leading to better results and a more motivated team.

⏱️ 3. Optimizes everyone’s time, reducing idle moments and unnecessary delays: effective resource scheduling ensures that everyone has meaningful work to do, minimizing downtime and keeping the momentum going. This helps your project schedule stay on track and prevents costly delays that may happen when tasks are left unassigned or due dates are missed. 

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Matt Smith

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Producer at STORM+SHELTER

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The shorthand of ‘resource management’ to describe teams and individuals is unhelpful. Instead, let’s shift our perspective and fully embrace the fact they have their own needs and limitations. By acknowledging that we are all human, we can foster a more supportive and understanding way of scheduling our teams.

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Schedule resources based on your team’s true capacity

Planning and managing your team’s capacity in real time is critical to successful resource scheduling. Resource management software gives you the most accurate view of available resources, workload, and project pipeline to schedule resources confidently ✅ 

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Want to give Float a try? It’s free!

Managing resources is easier using Float’s visual schedule. It allows you to view color-coded tasks in flight with precise timelines, keeping you updated on both project and team progress.

<cta-button>Get your free trial</cta-button>

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