I’ve worked in quite a few marketing agencies as a Project Manager and one of the most painful aspects of running any project is resource scheduling. By this, I mean planning what projects people are working on from week to week. For example, a designer might be working on a Coca Cola project on Monday morning then she might be booked on a Virgin Airways project in the afternoon. Then the rest of the week she could be working on all sorts of other projects at different times of the day. In the meantime, people will be trying to book her onto their projects and they need to know if she’s available or not. These bookings are often made days or weeks in advance and the schedule needs to be tracked somehow. Amazingly, the most common tool for tracking these bookings is a spreadsheet. And anyone who’s used a spreadsheet for this type of thing will tell you what a nightmare it can be.

I got talking to Percy Stilwell about this (a friend and colleague) and we decided it was time the world had a better resource planning tool. So, Resource Guru was born. It’s a web app that will revolutionise the way companies schedule their resources. It will be a fast, simple way to schedule people, equipment and other resources online. Customers will pay a monthly subscription fee and there will be no long term contracts. As the clever people at 37signals say, it will be “Easy On, Easy Off”. The interface will be beautiful and we think people will love it.

The app is launching later this year but, in the meantime, you can head over to resourceguruapp.com and sign up to be the first to hear when we launch. So, what are you waiting for? You could even win an iPad 2 if you forward it on to friends or colleagues.  I’ve worked on a lot of prize draws and you’ve got seriously good odds of winning with this one :)