How I use Float to plan allocations for the whole project team

Float, to me, is a great tool. It’s simple, yet powerful. It’s easy to use, and gives a great overview of user availability and planned alocations. Resources for the next project.

My perspective

Float is a tool for planning allocations of people across projects, and we use it every day. Let’s have a look at what I see when I want to plan for the next 6 weeks of projects:

I use a tag “Norway-Production” to filter out people I know will be discussed in our production meeting in Norway. Which people are tagged can vary over time.

In this example we see that these awesome developers are booked more or less until the end of April, and then we start to get some available time. When you see white/transparent allocation blocks, those are tentative, meaning they are not fully decided yet.

1. As a production manager, I try to get the full overview of all people’s capacity and all current and upcoming projects. That is a lot of information to process, but using Float makes it achieveable.
2. There are also very good reports, so we know at any given time if we have a lot of resources available in the upcoming weeks.

Developer’s perspective

As a developer, how should you use this tool? Well, I’m very interested in hearing from you in the comment field both how (and if) you use it today, and if you see more use cases

For me, there are two main use cases for you:

• I am scheduled to work on this project today, and this week. Is that what I’m doing? If not, I should talk to the PM.
• I see that I’m scheduled for much more/less time than I actually need to finish this. I should talk to the PM.

Float is very easy to use and set up. The drag and drop functionality for the scheduler is great and being able to switch from people to project is also very useful.

Project manager’s perspective

As a project manager, I also see two main use cases. I make sure I have the developers I need for the entire duration of my ongoing project. I have a new project starting soon and I can check which developers, with the right skillset, has available time.

Sales perspective

As a sales person, I see one main use case. I want to sell this great project, and I want check if we have resources available so I don’t promise the client a startup date when we are fully booked.

Your feedback is important to me

I want to know if we are using the tool in different ways. I want to know if there are great features I’m not using. I want to know if there are things obvious to me, that are not obvious to you.

To sum up, I want to learn! So please leave a comment, or ping me on Slack for an interesting discussion.