Resource planning — availability planner

A critical benefit of the availability planner in Synergy project resource planning is the control it gives to project managers. When someone in your team requests to be unavailable, the project manager can click one button from the team availability board that takes them to the resource planning board showing the time, person and project. The project manager can quickly see who else is unavailable at that time, what other projects that person is working on, and whether there are any deadlines to worry about. This allows the project manager to avoid leaving the project short staffed.

Synergy provides a default list of reasons for being unavailable and these can be added to if your organisation has specific names for things.

This is particularly helpful in a multi-office context where a project manager might want a particular person from another office or team to help on a project and can quickly check their availability in the resource planning Gantt chart.

While ‘leave’ is one of the reasons for unavailability, it’s important to clarify that Synergy is not acting as an HR tool to manage leave requests and absences. This availability planning is designed to show availability (more specifically, unavailability) on the planning board for project delivery and allow staff to request, and project managers to allocate and approve unavailability. We leave the leave management to dedicated HR software.