Resource Guru Reviews

Pros

- online so you can view it remotely
- clients can be color coded
- you can set various permission levels
- reporting is accurate
- customer service is fast

Cons

- searching for a specific project can be a challenge with no search feature
- nothing else, it works well.

Pros

Simplicity and focus. Resource Guru solves one problem, a problem that is key to our business - which is project resource assignment and scheduling. It does it quickly, and easily. Our prior tool required us to understand a complex CRM system with multiple interrelated functions. Resource Guru gives us the availability, assignment and schedule tools we need to deliver our projects without needless overhead.

Cons

I would like more user defined fields when we assign a resource to a project. We assign a project sales phase type to each project, and we assign an individual billing rate to each resource, which can be different for each day of the project. We currently do that using a strict taxonomy in the "Notes" field and them use an Excel macro to parse that information out for sales and revue forecasting. While this doe take a bit of management and programming magic - it is still orders fo magnitude less complicated that it was previously when we managed this data in our CRM system. Having those filed would just make our lives all that much simpler.

Pros

Ease of use and simple , effective visualization of scheduled resources

Cons

Needed to integrate with Harvest to get full picture of time actually spent on projects rather than just time scheduled

Pros

I like the appearance of the software - its clear, self explanatory, easy to navigate, see the bigger picture to jiggle schedule resource about, etc.

I like how easy and quickly the support team are there to assist when needed.

I like how it shows you who has booked what and the daily reminders via email of what is coming up, etc.

Cons

It isn't a negative but I would like to have a scheduling log, to see at what time and date did someone book a slot onto the schedule. I manage the Creative Studio, depending how many campaigns and the urgency in hitting these deadlines, I need to keep track of the entire departments availability, knowing when i can move things around in order to deliver last min projects. Only myself should have booking access, but I currently share it with Creative Directors, so they can schedule in my absence, but I can't see when they have booked them in so i can keep track. Is this something you could implement, please? Thanks,

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft 365

Reasons for Switching to Resource Guru

Office 365 is still a very new software that requires lots of updates and features adding to it, that yourselves already provide.

Pros

The software was very easy to implement and even easier to use. The reports page provides a great, visual presentation of our creative department's utilization for the week. Until we started using the software, we were unable to track enough data to inform a successful creative resource meeting. Now we have visibility into the upcoming weeks which has significantly decreased our dependence on freelance talent.

Cons

The waiting list and overtime feature can be a little confusing. The hours don't get added to resource bookings and increase the utilization percentage. It would be great if the overtime hours pushed the utilization percentage over 100% to clearly highlight over-allocated resources.

Alternatives Considered

Smartsheet and Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to Resource Guru

Using Excel and Smartsheet required too much effort and the Project Managers would not be able to effectively track changes in resource allocations.

Pros

1. It doesn't try to do anything other than what it's best for
2. Calendar sync
3. Cost-effectiveness
4. Responsiveness of the support team (including on UX suggestions! Amazing.)
5. The little guru on the dashboard. Yeah it's cosmetic but it makes me feel good every time I log in.
6. Easy to set up and use.

Cons

The only things I really dislike a cosmetic and non-fatal. They are:
1. The inability to hit a "today" button to go back to today's date, and the thin scrollbars right and left
2. The fact that I have to literally click and drag events to create instances on non-consecutive days, rather than selecting dates.

Alternatives Considered

Basecamp, ClickTime and Smartsheet

Reasons for Choosing Resource Guru

It's just ineffective to manage capacity in a calendar OR a spreadsheet (which is what we were doing previously).

Reasons for Switching to Resource Guru

Everything else is not just resource specific. Resource Guru is (ref comment about it just doing ONE thing and doing it extremely well). Plus the cost. Resource Guru is incredibly cost-effective for a micro team like ours, which runs almost entirely on subcontractors.

Pros

I love how easy it is to see a view of availability across multiple team members at the same time. I love the ability to color coordinate projects for an easy view of some major projects across multiple team members. Also easy to allow others permission to log in and see their utilization as well.

Cons

I have to manually enter in recurring meetings. I have not mastered an easy way to automate getting our clients and projects into the tool. would be good to multi select projects as well to get them closed or cleaned up.

Alternatives Considered

Saviom

Reasons for Switching to Resource Guru

Chose Guru for the cost and ease of use and setup.

Pros

Intuitively easy to use, good usage of colors to present a quick glance of resource versus objectives deliverables

Cons

Integration with existing calendars, tools may not be smooth and sometimes not synced.

Alternatives Considered

Trello, Microsoft Teams and monday.com

Reasons for Switching to Resource Guru

Good usage of colors to present information quickly

Pros

I've been using Resource Guru since 2013 and it's constantly improving which is good to see. It's easy to use and provides decent reporting.

Cons

I'd like to see public holidays auto populated according to a country of choice and ability to limit daily bookable hours just by a number (e.g. 7.5h) without setting a rigid start / end / lunch break.

Alternatives Considered

Asana

Switched From

Google Docs

Pros

Easy to use, simple for all team members. Looks visibly pleasing.
I have implemented Resource Guru to my previous and current working places.
Very good value for money.

Cons

Needs to have an action for users to click once they have completed the task. I have been waiting for this for a few years now.
Still not very mobile friendly.

Alternatives Considered

monday.com

Reasons for Switching to Resource Guru

It was more beneficial for my team and how we work daily.

Pros

Generally speaking the UX/UI of this platform is very user friendly and easy to learn/use. I love the color coding feature (that can be used for marking projects, resources, etc) and the recently added filtering by the "Resource Booker" is very useful too. Last but not least, I like that Resource Guru keep this product alive as every once in a while they publish new features and enhancements.

Cons

Resource Guru for our organization does a great job of helping us schedule resources of projects over time. So I can't really think of major issues. But one minor pain point is once we create a "non-billable" project and schedule resources on that project. Often and after a while (usually when a project is signed and official) we have to change that project to "billable", but although we do that, we still need to manually update each and every resource booking under the "Schedule" section and mark each booking to be "billable". Ideally and if we change the billability on a project level, all those resource bookings should inherit the change that was applied to the project.

Pros

The best part about Resource Guru is the reporting system. Given how fuss-free the management tools are to use, the reporting system is the proverbial icing on the cake, as it aggregates all your available data in one easy to use panel. Not to mention, it is so intuitive to use and has such a remarkably low barrier to entry, that I onboarded all my team managers in a single day, and have never looked back.

Cons

Some parts of the UI look a bit dated, like the "adding resources" panel, but it's honestly not a big deal because you only use it once when adding your resources, and hardly touch it ever again.

Other than that, changing the default working hours is a bit tedious, but again - do it once and you never need to adjust it again.

Alternatives Considered

Basecamp, Float and monday.com

Pros

The ability to filter, sort, and visualize resource assignments across 50+ individuals with a variety of technical abilities has helped remove a lot of the pain in managing geographical diverse field crews

Cons

I would like the ability to see 4-6 months on the screen at once. Instead of individual blocks for each day, I would like to see each block represent one week (a zoom out option).

Some projects are 1-5 days, while a lot of assignments are 3+ months.

Pros

Scheduling is really easy to do on the web version, I can book, amend or cancel resource in a matter of moments and easily drop and drag to move things around.

Cons

The mobile version on web browser can be a little clunky, it would be good to have an app version to make checking scheduling on the go (whilst at external meetings etc) easier to use, the same for booking resource on the go, its almost impossible to do so on mobile

Pros

This software is easy to learn and use. We can see the availability of resources at a glance, and it's simple to make any edits to current entries as needed. The option to add personal photos for resources is fun to use and adds a bit of personalization to each resource.

Cons

When choosing a date to enter information, we need to scroll over the calendar instead of clicking, because clicking on dates will automatically trigger a window for entering new information.

Pros

Intuitive, easy to use, efficient. Simplified our weekly and monthly production planning radically, allowing us to focus more effort on forecasting production load, maintaining workload balance and ensuring good capacity to execute our projects.

Cons

Doesn't yet have the ability to set recurring events. Drag and drop functions are sometimes unstable, particularly with cloud syncing.

Pros

+ flexible scheduling features
+ clear and easily readable UI

Cons

- if a day has 8h30m available, and 8h15m are scheduled, and another task is added with a 30m length, it shows up as "30m on waiting list and 15m free" - in my opinion, it would make more sense to show up as "15m on waiting list and 0m free"

Pros

We like the ability to visualize our employee utilization on a company-wide basis while being able to generate other utilization views by department and resource type. This helps us determine any utilization gaps and plan for cross utilization to ensure overall high utilization of our resources.

Cons

I would like to see a few more customization features for how the system currently treats over-bookings. We would like to be able to over-book resources and it show their utilization at 100%+ rather than it showing the conflict and a lower utilization until the over-allocation is corrected.

Pros

Software is relatively easy to use. It is not truly designed for a service type industry but with a little manipulation of the way fields are used, we have been able to make it a good resource for us to schedule our installation crews. It is much easier than many other programs I have looked at and our entire front office uses it to see daily schedules, schedule openings, future bookings as well as monitor backlog.

Cons

Program could use better co-ordination between bookings and scheduling as well as easier means to divide resources (employees) into groups (we did find a work around for this)

Pros

Friendly, very easy to use, and adaptable to my needs. Really enjoy the new things that come out regularly

Cons

Integration with other apps
No undo feature

Pros

Ease of use, highly customisable and visually appealing.

Cons

Something that could be added is the option of duplicating a scheduled project from one resource to another.

Pros

That you can easily move jobs around if they need to change and can book off holiday time and meeting time so that you don't overbook yourself.

Cons

The waiting time bit could be better if time is overbooked - doesn't allow for different lengths of working days.

Pros

flexibilityeasy of usefast overview about capacity

Cons

I would like a more powerful project overview on the scheduling page (for example sum of all hours planned for a specific project, wihout going to reports)

Pros

I liked the fact that Resource Guru was incredibly easy to use and allowed me to quickly and intuitively manage my team's resources. The software also allowed me to easily customize the way I view and organize resource data, which was very useful for staying organized.

Cons

One thing I disliked about Resource Guru was that it had a limited selection of integrations. This made it difficult for me to connect the software to other applications I used for project management. Additionally, there were some features that I had to pay extra for, which I felt was not ideal.