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Our customers ask about a wide variety of topics related to Silverbucket – and that makes us happy in the customer support. All kinds of questions are a good thing because it means that the tool is used quite extensively. Some issues are solved in just a few minutes, while some problems may require a longer and more in-depth investigation. Certain issues come up in our customers’ inquiries from month to month. Now, I will go through the most typical resourcing problems – and explain how Silverbucket responds to them.
1. Do the right people have access to the right information?
Reasonable resourcing requires the right people to have the right user rights.
In a traditional Excel based resourcing one has to define visibility and permissions one file at a time, which can be a repetitive and a stressful process. With Silverbucket, visibility and permissions can be adjusted automatically. Silverbucket has the ability to build a wide variety of user rights – as well as for large enterprises or smaller companies.
We get a lot of inquiries regarding the transparency of information. Someone may not see a particular thing or a particular person in the project. In this case, one may not know what the colleagues are doing and who is in which project. This varies in different companies: a smaller company may have more extensive user rights, whereas in larger companies the user rights are very precisely defined.
We have a huge amount of experience in what kind of user rights serve the business as well as possible – and our resourcing gurus always give a helping hand when deploying the tool. We ask the right questions from our new customers during the implementation phase. Sometimes, of course, situations change, in which case the user rights must also change. We have managed to find a proper user right model for each customer, however.
2. How can we further enhance our operations?
If a customer does not deploy the features of the resourcing tool that best suit their needs right from the start, it can complicate operations at a later stage. This may be the case especially with our new customers. Problems may not even be noticed during the first months.
The most awesome feedback you can get from customers is that “this functionality speeds up our work considerably”. The company may have been in trouble in the past, for example, about how to find the best possible experts for different projects. They may have done resourcing with a bit of a gut feeling, and there is no information about the skills of the employees in one place. When they then implement competency management in Silverbucket, they understand its value.
One of our clients wanted to ease the daily burden of project managers by showing more information on the projects. Useful information included allocated hours, actual hours, and budgeted hours. Moreover, the information needed to be grouped in a certain way. Separate grouping mechanisms were created for this, as well as the so-called "information mode" and "monetary information mode" for the project, which can be used in Silverbucket in addition to the traditional allocation mode.
3. How to get the most out of the resourcing tool during Corona time upheavals?
When the Coronavirus struck last March, we received a wide range of questions regarding the new situation. The Coronavirus situation does not in itself change resourcing – it will continue as before. The amount of support inquiries did not increase dramatically either. Above all, however, our customers wanted to know how to make information flow even better. Employees quickly switched to working remotely, and many wanted to know how Silverbucket fits into this new way of working.
As said earlier, the right kind of user rights helps information flow better. But many customers also adopted new types of procedures – how to make better use of, for example, so-called “absence projects”? An absence project is a project in the tool that can be used to be either on holiday – or laid off, if the situation is unfortunate. The employee appears to be 100 % absent, for example during his or her four-week summer vacation. During that time, he or she cannot be attached to other projects. So Silverbucket also has a handy solution for showing employee’s absence, even if everyone works remotely and does not see each other in the office.
So, the customers have many kinds of resourcing issues, but with a good resourcing tool they can be solved. However, one question comes up in Silverbucket customer support more than anything else. A thing that preoccupies many – especially after the holidays, when the mind and body have rested for a moment. Maybe you have already guessed the right answer? Yes. It is: "What's my password?"
