Scheduling Design and Programming Projects

How do you manage your multiple person web projects?

[Stores]

We are constantly in search of a better way of scheduling. We do a high volume of design and programming with a staff of about 17. Our scheduling right now is next to impossible. We can come close to estimate actual time...but its still off more than its on. There is a TON of variance which is beyond our control.

We were thinking about using Project but it seems too complex for what we need. We just basically need a way to schedule and organize small jobs (under 8 hours each) in an efficiant manner and check for load balancing and over scheduling.

Anyone found a good way?

[Shane]

I would not use project for this.

Do you people do time sheets? Until they do all effort will be pretty much wasted.

Try using Excel and what you probably want to do is track back the estimate and effort to see who is going over most often.

You also want to determine who bills the most and who bills the least.

Meeting estimate but under billing is not a good thing.

Good luck,
Shane

[Leonidas]

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.

[henry0]

I used to manage up to 75 people (doing projects but no software or web design)
Running a software and/or a wall chart will do fine
However the real key is human resource
Hire an office manager
You will get a high ROI on that move
Further no office manager will cost you coder's hour rate