"Nowadays the length of the production meetings has reduced and the meeting concentrates on the issues on the overall resourcing situation.”
Firstco are a systems engineering company, specialising in mission-critical control and communications systems within transportation environments, predominantly airports and rail stations. They consult, design, deliver, commission and support clients, providing technical consultancy, project and interface management, as well as systems design and integration in both major infrastructures and bespoke projects.
As Firstco has grown, so has the importance of managing more and more resources across an increasing number of projects. The approach of managing this with Excel spreadsheets ultimately became unwieldy and time consuming, so in August 2017 they started to use Silverbucket and now have much better visibility of their resource allocations.
Stephen Haynes (Director at Firstco) says: "Before Silverbucket, the project managers were trading people in the monthly production meetings. Nowadays the length of the production meetings has reduced and the meeting concentrates on the issues on the overall resourcing situation.”
From the Silverbucket's programs view they check the overall situation of the projects, and then go from top down to the details. After the projects' situation has been walked though, the overall situation of the entire personnel is reviewed. Silverbucket's people overview clearly shows the possible resourcing conflicts or if there isn’t enough allocated work. They have approximately 65 ongoing projects, so there is no sense in going through the projects one-by-one.
The project managers have also recently started to use Silverbucket. They update projects' resourcing needs to Silverbucket before the monthly production meetings, some of them more frequently.
Firstco use different views to get a good baseline of information. For example, by viewing the forecast for 3 months ahead, any drop in allocation levels would be immediately visible and could be addressed in good time.
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