Welcome to EmployPlan Docs!

This site is designed to help customers and potential users get a deeper insight into how EmployPlan works, how to accomplish work in the platform as well as guidance on integrations and best practices. Here you can learn more about how to use EmployPlan effectively, it's features, functions and workflows as well as guidance on best practices.

Navigating our Documentation Site

This the documentation home page and can be accessed from anywhere by clicking on the upper left of the screen where it says, "EmployPlan Documentation" or on the icon of a home at the top of the center column. The menu on the left helps you navigate between different topics; we encourage you to start with 'Getting Started' if you are a new customer and using EmployPlan for the first time.

For advanced users, you can jump straight to a topic or search through the search box in the upper left panel.

It may be helpful to first read about what EmployPlan is, why it was built and how it works through Understanding Employplan. Once you have read this, then we can walk through the process of setting up your institution as an instance in EmployPlan and the process of creating and staffing your first project.

What is EmployPlan?

EmployPlan addresses the challenges of managing a constantly evolving bench of skilled resources for tech teams, particularly in development and cloud operations. As technology and project requirements change rapidly, traditional resource management tools focus on utilization and availability, failing to ensure that assigned personnel have the precise skills and experience needed. This mismatch leads to costly project delays, rework, and margin loss. Unlike checkbox solutions in the PSA market, EmployPlan emphasizes granular skill tracking, demonstrated experience, and project management to financial goals, offering a complete solution for building effective teams.

In the services market, numerous tools help manage different aspects of project execution, yet they often lack the depth to match the right skills and costs to specific projects effectively. Professional Services Automation (PSA) platforms like Kantata (formerly Mavenlink) and Certinia (formerly FinancialForce) offer broad project management features, providing visibility into timelines, budgets, and resources. However, they primarily focus on financial and project status tracking rather than capturing the nuanced skills and experience of individual team members. Task management tools, such as Jira and Asana, excel at tracking work tasks, progress, and project deliverables but are limited to operational aspects, missing the details of team members’ skills and the applicability of their expertise to the task at hand.

Similarly, time card solutions like Clockify or Tempo help track hours spent on specific projects, feeding into revenue and cost calculations. Yet, these systems don’t capture the qualitative experiences and learning each team member gains. For example, if an employee gains hands-on experience with a specific technology on a project, or builds expertise through self-study, conferences, or contributing to open-source projects, this growth remains invisible within typical PSA, task, or time management platforms.

EmployPlan addresses this critical gap by actively tracking formal and informal learning and actual project experiences. It captures insights that go beyond certifications, including practical application of skills across projects, and informal learning, such as reading technical books, attending industry events, or working on side projects. This approach provides managers with a detailed, up-to-date view of team members’ real-world experience, allowing for smarter, more precise project assignments based on true capability rather than superficial role descriptions or outdated resumes.

The challenge is knowing who truly has relevant skills for a project, as resumes often remain outdated, and valuable skill details are overlooked or forgotten. This oversight can lead to administrative burdens and missed opportunities to leverage skilled employees.

EmployPlan's Solution: Optimizing Resource Assignment and Development

EmployPlan was designed to ensure project success by automating the matching of skills to project needs, tracking each team member’s project experiences, self-learning, and certifications. By integrating with time and task management systems, EmployPlan builds a comprehensive profile for each employee based on real project data and certifications, as well as self-reported learning events.

This platform offers project managers the tools to allocate the right resources, assign mentors, and recommend training to close skill gaps as they arise, creating a continually updated view of the team’s expertise.

How EmployPlan Stands Out Among Other Platforms

While task management tools like Jira or ServiceNow manage day-to-day work, EmployPlan provides an intelligence layer that aligns team skills with project roles, phases, and budgets. Projects begin in EmployPlan, defining roles and matching team members based on experience and expertise. Once allocated, these roles sync with task and time management systems, enabling seamless assignment and billing.

EmployPlan serves as a "control plane," overseeing project structures and resource allocations while enhancing task and time systems with dynamic, skill-based insights.

Building Talent Through Real-Time Skill Tracking

EmployPlan enables each team member to track both formal and informal learning, whether assigned or self-directed. This visibility helps individuals identify steps to advance their careers, and resource managers can address skill gaps through project assignments or targeted training. EmployPlan’s broad experience tracking aligns team growth with evolving customer and market needs, optimizing talent development.

Mastering Project Creation and Management with EmployPlan

EmployPlan simplifies project creation by allowing users to define roles and skills via AI prompts or predefined profession templates. The system then assigns the best-matched resources, establishing a clear project structure and tracking talent development to ensure each project is staffed with the right expertise.

Where to start?

If you are the institutional administrator setting up EmployPlan, start with the topic.

If you are a project manager or resource manager looking to understand project workflows and using EmployPlan, start with the topic "Building and Managing Projects in EmployPlan"

If you are a user who is onboarding your profile, start with "Joining an EmployPlan Instance"

Best Practices: Managing with EmployPlan

EmployPlan is a flexible tool designed to adapt to your business needs based on how you run and manage your teams. Below are some best practices for running a services business with EmployPlan. This example outlines the typical weekly workflow for a mid-sized consulting firm. Feel free to adapt the platform to suit your specific needs.

Distributing the Work of Project Creation and Role Allocations

When using EmployPlan, the first step for new projects should be created by the Project Managers who will lead them, along with the client management team that sold the new work. In this stage, the Project Manager and the client manager work to establish the overall project structure and create the roles for the project, allocating these roles to each stage, setting the time allocation as a % of a full week and setting up the required specific skills and capabilities each role must have to be effective, as well as the level of experience required.

The next step in the process is defining the appropriate roles for the project, specifying the necessary skills and experience as determined by the Project Manager and Client Manager. In this way, the people who have the most knowledge on the required roles, skills and project economics can build the structure of their project.

Working Collaboratively on Project Staffing

Once the project structure is established and the roles have been created with the requirements for skills, experience and time requirements, EmployPlan recommends that companies hold meetings, at least weekly for smaller firms to more often for larger firms, with resource managers, project managers, financial managers, and learning managers to review project staffing, allocate new staff to projects, and manage any changes in staff, such as absences or illnesses requiring coverage and to assign any training or mentoring to close gaps.

These meetings can be conducted remotely or in-person. The key focus should be on balancing resources across projects, allocating critical talent to essential roles, proactively assigning training and mentoring to address skill gaps, and managing project profitability targets.

The primary tool for managing resource allocation is our Resource Staffing process. This algorithm matches staff to roles based on skills, experience, and cost-effectiveness through an intuitive interface. We will detail the use of the staffing tool in a subsequent chapter in depth, the emphasis here is on the best practice of active discussion among the management team, facilitated by this tool, which enhances productivity and minimizes backroom negotiations that can undermine efficiency.

Managing Projects as an Active Process

Once projects are created, roles allocated, and staff assigned, the next step is to take the project live. Activating the project sets up all allocations, skill training requirements, mentoring, and authorizations for billing through the time management system. It also synchronizes task access across our integrated systems.

Active project management is done through the Chessboard. The Chessboard provides a comprehensive view of all active, paused, planned, and past projects, allowing the management team to make informed staffing decisions. This includes addressing absences, skill gaps, and reallocating talent to critical areas.

After finalizing changes, the Chessboard synchronizes updates across integrations and notifies users of role changes. Completed tasks and timecards remain unchanged, while future timecards and to-dos are automatically reassigned. Tasks in progress are sent to the project manager for resolution.

Distributing the Task of Tracking Development

One of the biggest challenges in running a services company is tracking all the activities involved in developing and delivering work. Technical staff often engage in self-learning through online seminars, technical books, trade show conferences, or formal training.

Typically, services firms address this by asking employees to provide an updated resume to the resource manager monthly, capturing new experiences and skills. While this may inform customers about the quality of your team, it lacks the depth needed for effective staffing decisions.

EmployPlan uses a personal profile model that allows users to log every learning activity, and it captures all delivery experiences through the task and time card systems. This builds a weighted profile of their skills and experiences, including recency and depth. EmployPlan's system uses ranking and gamification to help employees track their growth and development.

This approach ensures that resource and project managers have the most up-to-date view of employees' skills and capabilities in real-time. Consequently, the system can make informed allocations, achieving customer satisfaction and profitability.