"We're very proud of our planning module, but ideally, we want our customers to spend as little time on it as possible."

You extensively briefed us on the new projects in Teamleader Focus. You hinted then about what was on the roadmap after the whole project scenario. And today, you're going to tell me more about that?

Servaas: That's correct. Over the last few months, we've been working hard as a team on a completely new planning module.

Rosalie: Hello! I'm Customer Success Manager at Teamleader Focus. This means I support our customers so that they can get the most out of Teamleader Focus. I'm here today to explain how our team will help our customers implement the new planning module successfully.

Servaas: We always had one, but we noticed it had a lot of flaws. Eventually, like with the Projects module, we decided to start from scratch and rebuild the module entirely. As our customers grew, we saw many of them scheduling work more often. They then need a clear overview of the available capacity and what's already scheduled. And that overview was lacking in the old planning module.

When your team grows and workload increases, it's no longer optimal to verbally agree on who does what and when. That's when you need a planning system. And that's the main reason we designed this module.

Servaas: Our customers mainly want to maintain an overview, easily schedule tasks, and reschedule work.

Firstly, they want to keep track of their team's availability. Suppose a big lead comes in; you need to see when you can deliver that project. With that overview, you can immediately see the team's workload and know if certain colleagues or teams still have room for additional work.

The second challenge is scheduling work. We want to make it easy for our customers to find work by filtering on different properties and then assigning that work to the right colleague. This way, you can easily and quickly schedule the right work for the right person.

Finally, it's crucial to be able to reschedule things. Shit happens. Someone might get ill, or a deadline might be extended. Then you need to be able to shift your work without causing problems for other projects. Being able to reschedule projects easily is a must.

Servaas: With the new Planning, you can also see the total capacity. You can see a capacity overview per user, but you also have an overview of your entire company's capacity, and you can even zoom in on one or more teams. That's where it gets interesting: you can see how much availability there is for a certain department or if you need to reschedule tasks.

Rosalie: Unlike other tools, your entire flow is in one system with Teamleader Focus. You create and send your quote in Teamleader, then turn it into a project, and translate that into the operational tasks that need to be done. And now you can easily schedule that work within Teamleader. After your project (or during), you can also invoice your work from Teamleader.

Having everything in one platform gives you a better overview. If you work in different tools, you have to enter information twice, which not only creates extra work but also increases the chance of errors. By keeping all information within Teamleader Focus, you work more efficiently, have a better overview, and reduce the margin of error.

Servaas: It wouldn't hurt to emphasize the ease of use again, especially for scheduling and rescheduling tasks. When something unexpected happens—your colleague is sick, another project is delayed—you need to shift work. That should be quick and simple.

We're very proud of our planning module, but we actually want our customers to spend as little time on it as possible.

Servaas: With simple drag & drop functionalities, users can easily place tasks in their colleagues' schedules. Another important aspect is that the layout is always customisable. You can easily filter your overview on the people or teams that are important to you. Additionally, you can adjust the time scale to see more or fewer days. You can also expand days and people to see more details.

The key here is that we accommodate different usage. If you want to see a lot of information, you can. If you want a high-level overview without being overwhelmed by all the details, you can have that too. That's the balance we're trying to strike: the tool doesn't dictate how you work. You work your way, and the tool adapts.

Servaas: Many of our customers relied on complex Excel or Google Sheets for their planning. So they worked with different, standalone spreadsheets that don't communicate with each other and aren't linked to Teamleader Focus. Read: an immense amount of manual work and guaranteed errors creep in.

So what does our Planning bring to organisations? Time! And free hands! Because all the work you had to do manually in spreadsheets is taken over (and streamlined) by our planning module. And then you can focus on creating more value for your customers.

Rosalie: Our planning module revolves around scheduling people. So, first and foremost, this is handy for organisations that sell their time, bill on an hourly basis, provide a service.

The size of the organisation is also a factor. The more people work, the more needs to be planned, of course. From around 5 or 6 users, we notice that projects become difficult to manage without a planning module. But even smaller teams with many projects say they derive noticeable benefits from Planning.

In theory, any industry can use Planning as long as you need to schedule work on people regularly.

Rosalie: It starts with us internally. All our Support teams are trained by the Product team so that we know Planning inside out.

Then our customers should always be able to find us. I need to be easily reachable as a contact person, or they can ask their questions via chat.

But often, people also want to discover it on their own. They don't necessarily want to schedule a meeting with me or wait for support. So we have an extensive range of useful support articles and short how-to videos that guide you through the module. And we also organise webinars to give a demo on a large scale and answer questions.

So you can search for information yourself at any time, but we're, of course, always there for 1-on-1 support.

*On average, you get an answer to your questions within 3 hours at Teamleader.

Rosalie: I would recommend regularly reviewing your schedule with the entire team at fixed times. A moment where you briefly consider the question: "What's scheduled?" "Is this still feasible?" This way, you ensure that the entire team is aware of what's going to happen.

This allows you to spot problems early and do something about them. That's really important because unexpected things always happen. But "bad news early, is good news." It's about being able to deal easily with unexpected events.