How Monterail simplified resource scheduling with Primetric

Monterail is a leading Polish software development company that grew from a small team to 110+ people running an organization recognized by the Financial Times as one of Europe’s 1000 fastest growing companies.

Resource Planning
industry
Software Development Company
Resource Planning
Location
Poland
Resource Planning
company size
51-200
Resource Planning
type of projects
Time & Material, Fixed Price
Resource Planning
used software
Jira, Harvest, Pipedrive
“When the Sales Team comes to me asking if we have specialists available for a new project, I can now find that out in 30 seconds. I can quickly let them know who is available and when.”

Alexandra Ardelean

Resource Planning Specialist

Introduction

Established in 2010, Monterail is a leading Polish software development company that grew from a small team to 110+ people running an organization recognized by the Financial Times as one of Europe’s 1000 fastest growing companies.

Monterail delivers web and mobile apps to a wide range of clients, from startup unicorns to leading enterprises across various industries. Growing from a strong Ruby on Rails expertise, the company is an Official Vue.js Partner and specializes in technologies such as Ruby, React, Vue.js, and Angular.

Monterail had an advanced and detailed planning process but lacked the right tool to support it. Primetric responded to the company’s complex planning needs and addressed exceptions through feature customization.

By implementing Primetric, Monterail gained full visibility into its employees, making planning and resource scheduling faster, easier, and more cost-effective.

Read on to find out how Monterail achieved all of this with our help.

Monterail’s structure in a nutshell

At Monterail, developers take ownership of projects, but occasionally work or consult on 2 or 3 projects at a time and are assigned in line with the changing/ agile project needs. Thanks to this approach, the company can address the rapidly evolving client requirements.

However, this type of structure comes at a price.

It poses a serious organizational challenge: the lack of up-to-date overall information about the availability of particular specialists over specific periods of time and the number of hours for which these experts have been scheduled for projects under development.

Main Challenge: Lack of employee visibility

The Operations department at Monterail is responsible for managing the scheduling and availability of developers. They bring together Human Resources (HR), Project Management (PM), Customer Success, and Sales departments to coordinate team allocations, basically determining who would be available when and for what amount of hours. This process generated different Excel spreadsheets with information about the availability of developers.

Main organizational problems

  • Data visualization & communication issues,
  • Time-consuming meetings,
  • Lack of integrations with the time tracking software,
  • Lack of comprehensive reports,
  • Stand-by time that was difficult to optimize.
"When I joined Monterail, understanding the planning overview required compiling data from a few  Excel spreadsheets, this inevitably, made me often wonder whether I didn't forget anything. In the end, this means that I was keeping all the key info in my head anyway and relied on remembering various non-standard situations that just weren’t formally documented in any of the files. Thanks to Primetric, I have a great ally for remembering everything and I don’t have to ask several departments every now and then to confirm every allocation.”
Alexandra Ardelean - Resource Planning Specialist at Monterail

Starting the change

As the first step, Monterail implemented Resource Guru, a tool that was supposed to improve planning efficiency.

After several months, it turned out that the tool was too simple, as it didn’t take into account cases such as initial reservations of specialists, or uncertain projects that were only planned. The lack of integration with the time tracking tool used at Monterail prevented Alex from comparing plans with reality.

This is when Monterail reached out to us

When Monterail came to us, we brainstormed together about how they could use our tool to address their specific challenges and scale. We created Primetric on the basis of the feedback we got from software development companies of similar size. That’s why Primetric had all the functionalities that were missing in Resource Guru.

“I came across Primetric, and it turned out that it had a whole lot of functionalities that I missed in Resource Guru like a feature for tracking complex financial data and reporting. I know that your solution is quite new to the market - that was a bit scary in terms of data security and stability. However, I was convinced by your support availability, personalized approach, and lightning-fast response time. This was a problem at Resource Guru, even though they had a very responsive support department.”
Alexandra Ardelean - Resource Planning Specialist at Monterail

Starting the cooperation

When working with Monterail, we adjusted our platform to match their unique needs - and that turned out to be our winning point.

Importing data from Resource Guru to Primetric was challenging, so we asked Alex to send us the exported files and we got that fixed for her. We then explained how to use Primetric step by step. We started with a test implementation during which we helped to migrate the data and then configured Primetric to allow Alex to check how she would be using it in a real use case. The testing process lasted 14 days and was carried out free of charge. After that, it became clear that Primetric was definitely much more effective than Resource Guru.

“What also convinced me to implement Primetric was that during the test implementation, you were ready to adjust the system. The functionalities I needed and that were missing appeared very quickly.”
Alexandra Ardelean - Resource Planning Specialist at Monterail

How Monterail uses Primetric to ace people scheduling

Monterail uses the following Primetric features:

  • Calendar divided into people and projects - users can zoom it in and out by days, weeks, or months. The calendar view shows the capacity of individual team members and marks people who are overloaded with work or on the bench. This helps Alex to quickly contact PMs and find out what’s going on.
  • Soft bookings - they allow Alex to reserve people’s time and see how that affects other projects. The feature also helps in identifying the best person for a specific project.
“When the Sales Team comes to me asking if we have specialists available for a new project, I can now find that out in 30 seconds. I can quickly let them know who is available and when.”
Alexandra Ardelean - Resource Planning Specialist at Monterail
  • Reports - Primetric offers a wealth of reports that improved Alex’s workflow a lot. She can now see sales opportunities for technologies that are available at the moment. This allows finding projects for people who specialize in them, using historical data for discovery patterns.
  • Vacancy reporting - Alex can now easily see what type of specialists will be needed in the upcoming months and discuss these insights with the HR department. What’s more, both HR and Operations can visualise team skills' availability and distribution over time.
  • More efficient meetings - during one-on-one meetings with PMs, Alex can instantly notice if the allocated time in projects is distributed properly - basically checking whether projects need scale-ups or scale-downs on any roles.
"Sometimes, projects require specific technical skills and we may have several developers available who meet the required criteria. The calendar in Primetric facilitates our decision, because it allows us to compare side by side people’s specific skills, their experience and availability to find the best fit for the client."
Alexandra Ardelean - Resource Planning Specialist at Monterail

Results

  • No more time lost on compiling data from spreadsheets
  • Greater productivity of the Resource Planning Specialist
  • Reduction in the number of errors in people scheduling
  • Cost optimization as Primetric is more cost-effective than Resource Guru
  • Single source of truth for the Project Management, HR, and Sales departments, that brings greater information transparency and fewer meetings
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