Why Event Managers Should Plan Resources
Event managers should plan resources because very few event businesses run one event at a time. An agency delivering a product launch in March is usually also staffing a trade show, quoting a summer festival and holding dates for a client who hasn’t signed yet. Each event gets its own spreadsheet or project board, and each one looks fine on its own.
The trouble surfaces only when those files are compared, which rarely happens before something breaks. The same rigging crew appears on two run sheets for one weekend, or a projector marked free in one plan turns out to be promised to another event. By load-in, the fix costs a rental fee or a favor. Seasonal peaks raise the stakes because every client wants the same few dates, as anyone who has staffed Halloween events knows.
Tentative work adds another layer. A hold on a venue or a crew lead behaves like a booking long before the contract is signed. When holds live in someone’s inbox rather than in the plan, the team either double-books or turns down work it had room for. Planning resources across every event, confirmed or tentative, is how event managers close that gap.
Because as with any activity with hundreds of variables, fixed deadlines, and a million things that can go wrong, resource management gives you a clear picture of what’s happening. As well as a plan of action when you need to make adjustments along the way.
How Ganttic handles resource planning for event managers
In Ganttic, every person, room, vehicle and piece of equipment is a resource on one shared timeline. Events become projects, and the work inside them becomes tasks booked onto resources. Because the resource scheduling view is organized by resource, a technician’s row shows every event they’re booked on across your project portfolio. A clash appears as overlapping bars while there’s still time to fix it.
Here is how to create a Resource and fill in Data Fields in Ganttic:
Pro-tips for event managers and agencies:
– A load-in needs the crew, the van and the rig at the same hour, so Ganttic lets you assign one task to several resources. Edit the task and every copy changes with it, so moving the load-in by two hours moves the people and the equipment together. Busy time isn’t split between them either: a four-hour load-in counts as four hours for each person and item on it.
– For events that aren’t confirmed, unassigned tasks let you build the schedule first and choose people later. They sit in an Unassigned section at the top of the chart, visible to every planner, and once the client signs you drag each one onto whoever is free.
– Utilization tracking divides each resource’s busy time by its available time and shows the result as a percentage, so a freelancer at 140% for the week stands out while you can still rebalance. Task dependencies hold the order of an event day, with the stage build finishing before sound check starts. The history log records who moved a booking and when, which settles most arguments about where the projector went.
DRPG is a creative communications agency headquartered in Hartlebury, in the UK Midlands. Its work spans end-to-end event management, video campaigns, product launches and rebrands.
With more than 350 people split across event, digital, manufacturing and film teams, DRPG’s planning problem was variety.
Each team booked different resources in different ways, and the resource management tools the agency had been using were causing friction. DRPG wanted one planner that several managers could book into at once, that updated in real time and notified people when a task moved, that synced with Outlook, and that gave every team a readable overview of projects, tasks and resources.
The digital department led the search and tested three planning tools. Ganttic was the one DRPG kept. By January 2020, three months after finding it, two departmental teams were planning in Ganttic, and two more have joined since.
The Live team uses Ganttic in the field while events are running, assigning several resources to one task and switching between filtered views to see the wider picture. The digital team plans further out. Pipeline projects sit as unassigned tasks until they’re confirmed, projects are colored by client, and partners outside the agency follow progress through live open-access URL views. Three managers do the assigning, and everyone else sees the work shared with them, including in their Outlook calendars.
DRPG hasn’t published efficiency figures. What it did report is the spread from two teams to four, and a first for Digital Resourcer Joe Jenkins: he could send a client a roadmap of its possible projects for the whole year. That kind of roadmap depends on the habit described earlier, keeping tentative work in the plan where a client can see the year before any of it is booked.
For rental and production companies, the equipment is often the business. Staging, AV kits, photobooths and furniture earn money only while they’re out on a job, and they lose days to transit, cleaning and repairs in between. In Ganttic each item can be its own resource, with custom Data Fields for status, location and service dates, so finding every serviced projector that’s in the warehouse next Friday takes one filter.
Put transit and repair time on the timeline too, or the plan will show kit as free while it’s still on a truck. For the measurement side, see how four Ganttic customers tackled equipment utilization.
Sharing the plan with freelancers, venues and clients
Event work depends on people outside the payroll: freelance riggers, venue managers, caterers, the client’s own team. When a tool charges per seat, those people rarely get a login, and the planner ends up exporting spreadsheets and answering availability questions by text. Ganttic charges for the resources you schedule and keeps user accounts unlimited, a model explained in resource-based vs user-based pricing. You can add freelancers and clients as users and set what each one can see or edit through user permissions.
People who will never log in can still follow along. A shared URL view is read-only and expires on a date you choose, so a venue can see its own load-in schedule and nothing else. Crew who live in their calendars can sync tasks to Google Calendar or Outlook, and anyone on site can check their day in the Ganttic mobile app for Android and iOS.
Keywords Studios, formerly KiteTeam, provides video game localization from offices in Spain, Mexico and Brazil, and has recorded sound and effects for titles including Halo and Call of Duty.
The company began as three separate businesses. Merging them left three recording studios in Madrid that needed one schedule showing who was in which studio, from when to when. The team picked Ganttic because a single booking could cover an actor, a creative engineer, an audio engineer and the studio together.
Day to day, they keep separate views for meeting-room availability and for each project, and use custom data fields to filter work in progress. The part worth borrowing is how they handle freelance directors. Ganttic’s holiday feature was built to record staff leave. Keywords Studios uses it to mark the days each director is available, then books sessions into those windows.
The team says it would be hard to put a number on the gain. Managing Director Pako Barreras points instead to the overview: who is doing what, and when, visible in one glance. An event team juggling freelance AV technicians can use the same trick to replace a thread of availability texts with one view.
Plan your next event season in one place
Ganttic gives event managers, and creative agencies that run live events alongside studio and digital work, one timeline for crew, kit, rooms and vehicles.
A double booking shows up there while there’s still time to fix it. Tentative jobs wait in the plan as unassigned tasks until the client signs, and shared tasks move people and equipment together when a load-in shifts, the same two habits DRPG’s Live and digital teams rely on.
Moreover, pricing is based on the resources you schedule, and every plan includes unlimited users, so freelancers, venue partners and clients can follow the plan at no extra cost.
Try Ganttic free for 14 days and see for yourself how resource planning can make the next event you plan even more perfect.