Architecture and engineering firms
Architecture and engineering practices run long jobs on short staff. A scheme can take a year, and every drawing issue waits on the same few senior people. PeopleMuster puts each job's hours, its milestones and your team's load in one place. You see who's overbooked while there's still time to move the deadline.
A practice's working week
Office hours on paper, with two kinds of day that break them. Site visits take someone out of the studio for a morning. Submission weeks keep your drawing team late four nights running.
A named shift covers the normal day, assigned per person from a start date. A planning deadline may need an extended window for a fortnight. You assign that team the longer shift with a two-week duration.
Every change sits in the assignment history with the assigner's name. When someone asks in spring why the late window ran so long, you'll have the answer on the record.
Checking in from the studio and on site-visit days
Your studio can use a ZKTeco fingerprint terminal on the office network. PeopleMuster reaches it by IP and pulls new punches every 30 minutes on weekdays, and nothing is installed on the device. Fingerprints stay on the terminal.
On a site-visit morning, browser check-in does the job instead. An admin switches it on, and the card opens inside a window around each person's shift, an hour before the start by default. Your admin can move every edge of that window.
If an engineer misses the window because a site meeting overran, the card routes them to a manual punch request. HR approves it, and the correction stays on the record with the approver's name.
The number practices argue about
Load on your project leads. Every job needs a senior person to review and sign off, and there are only ever a few of them.
Your capacity grid shows it. Group resource allocation by person, and each lead's row shows planned hours by day across every job they touch. Each day is banded under, partial, full or over against their working day. A lead sitting in the over band for three weeks is your next missed issue date.
Approved leave and company holidays come off that grid at once. A project lead's fortnight away shows as empty days, so nobody schedules a design review into them.
Logged hours tell you what the plan missed. Your team records each day against the job in the daily recap, and utilisation reporting splits those hours by project and department, week over week. Jobs flagged fixed price stay separate from hourly ones, so you can see where fee-based work is eating time.
Each job also carries its milestones, its health score and its setup score. A job that shows three of eight milestones done in its ninth month gives you a conversation to have.
Which modules run here
Switched on
- Resource allocation
- Each lead's planned days across every job, by person or by project, with leave already out.
- Daily recap
- Hours per job, logged by the person who drew or checked the work, with approvals.
- Utilisation reporting
- Hours by job and department, with fixed-price work separate from hourly.
- Projects
- Milestones, health and setup scores, and the fixed-price or hourly flag per job.
- Meetings
- Design reviews filed against the job via Fireflies, with action items pulled out.
- Devices
- CAD workstations by processor, RAM, storage and screen size, and who holds each one.
- Skills
- Structural, services or BIM coordination as categories you define, mapped to people.
- Checklists
- A drawing-issue routine as a template, run against each job as a tracked process.
Left off
- Todos
- Each job's tasks already live on its project board.
Questions people ask
Can we see one project lead's load across every job?
Yes. Group the resource allocation grid by person and read that lead's row. You'll see their planned hours by day across every job, banded against their working day, with leave and holidays already taken out.
How do people record a day spent on a site visit?
They check in from the browser card, which opens inside their shift window once an admin switches it on. Then they log the hours against the job in the daily recap, like any other day.
What does it cost for a practice of twenty-five?
$3 per person per month, so twenty-five people pay $3 each with every module included. There's no setup fee, and you get 14 days free with no card required.