It's the key problem to solve in this type of business. I used to schedule and manage 15 software developers on 4hr to 10 day jobs, and it took an enormous amount of time.
In the end I had a job tracking and management system developed incrementally in MSAccess by a bright PA, while managing the actual timetabling of jobs on a large magnetic wall chart. And yes, it was painful to keep the two in line.
However, the benefits were enormous: poor reliability had been keeping the company small, and by solving it we were able to move from being a "cottage industry" company to being a proper, professional software company.
