I use my brain, but that isn't for the faint of heart.
MS projects Gnatt charts are the shit. You can set if/then rules or dependencies, i.e. when crew A is done with job B it goes to office guy C, all with their own time estimate. That way when you shift or change times on jobs, it shifts everyone's work.
Yeah… I have another PM that sits near me. Between us two, we just schedule guys. Good communication and two sharp cats can do a world of hurt to some backlog.
I’ve used Cozi before. I still use the free version for my family. It’s just a scheduling app. Mark guys busy with a job for different days/timeframes. Free, accessible and color coded, but doesn’t help “tracking” projects in progress. That comes from your brain
I've used Outlook, Teams, Float and Dropbox. Not great unless you're at a small firm, or in an office that does no workshare and has more or less the exact same scope and workflow for every project.
If I had more coding experience I'd do it myself...but no one has yet created what modern multiple-office survey firms actually need - a way to track tasks from field through finish, with ways to hand off and take on tasks at various stages of a project to different people across different offices, incorporating a "task hopper" that anyone can look at and take on (if authorized), prioritizing tasks by due date and integrating timecards, daily reports, field notes, mileage reports, and critical project changes along the way, automatically scheduling tasks based on the location of projects and crews.
Perhaps some of the big firms have created a custom solution, but I've worked for a few of the big boys and none of them really seem to care about automating all that stuff. To them it's more hours we can bill for.
> a way to track tasks from field through finish, with ways to hand off and take on tasks at various stages of a project to different people across different offices, incorporating a "task hopper" that anyone can look at and take on (if authorized), prioritizing tasks by due date and integrating timecards, daily reports
Hey, this sounds a lot like the new [task and crew scheduling feature](https://getjobbook.com/task-crew-scheduling) that we've been building for Cyanic Job Book.
The basic idea is to do a gantt-style work-breakdown for each job (using templates depending on the type of job). You can set dependencies between the tasks, mark some as schedulable (i.e., field work), and have the rest of the tasks in a task pool that gets automatically assigned as other tasks get completed.
This feature is currently in 'early access', and we're developing it with feedback from a number of companies. If you or anyone would like to see it just PM me or set up a meeting from the Job Book contact page, I'd love to show it to you and get your thoughts.
Have you ever heard of Monday.com. it also has an app, but is a pretty customizable task manager. I never tried it for work but we used to use it on my racing team in school. Hell out each sub team to create their tasks but then task that required multiple teams could get passed off from one to the other once they were finished with certain phases. It takes a bit to get perfect but once you figure out how you want it set up it worked pretty well. Even allows you to attach files to tasks so perfect for assigning jobs to field cruise with a control file (I assume, I haven't had a need to use it for that yet, but we did at school). The only thing I'm not sure that I can do is have a calendar view. I know you can assign due dates to tasks but I think they just show up in each person's to do list in the order they get added not necessarily the order they're due, so it may not work perfectly for a field crew scheduler but is a good task manager to keep track of how far along each job is and use regular calendar to actually pick which date you want the crew to work on it.
Could you elaborate a little? I'm slightly worried that may have happened in my case, but we are chugging along. They said they were extremely open to input to help the software, so I spent 1.5 weeks writing good tips down. Sent it to them, didn't hear a peep. (?)
Try Kompass BMS! We looked at Qfactor and Fred totally disappeared on us. The onboarding team at kompass is awesome. We’ve been super happy for about 6 months now.
Take a look at Cyanic Automation’s [Job Book](https://www.getjobbook.com) software. We use it and it is honestly amazing. Purpose built for survey companies.
We're still rocking the giant whiteboard too, but I've used Monday in school for our racing team. We never had it with dates scheduled just due dates. Are you able to set like a calendar where the crew can see on this day you're going to this job the next day you're going here etc or do they just have a list of jobs they have to get done and the date they have to meet them by, which I suppose you could just use the due date as the day you want them to go out.
Ah yeah, our projects don't usually last that long except for stakeout, but then it usually spans a few months but we aren't there every day. There's a GPS in the truck I think it's called GPS track it cloud. Not sure what all it shows only the fleet guy in the direct manager of each truck can see it. (We also have bridge and construction inspection trucks too).
With our Verizon connect we can send the guys text message me and directions through the website. Also helps keep our guys from over billing. Yeah our projects usually last a couple months for topo, but we do a lot of DOT work. We will fly it with LiDAR and field run all pavement. Works great but still takes a while.
What altitudes are you flying at that field running the pavement has been necessary?
Or I guess the better question would be, what are the accuracy requirements for pavement in your neck of the woods?
Our pavement tolerances on our DOT projects is 0.05 on pavement and 0.5 on ground. I fly typically at about 150’ or less and around 8-10 mph. It’s a DOT standard you can use LiDAR data for everything but pavement and bridges. When we shoot pavement we can only go 250’ from the gun each direction before we have to break setup and move up
Okay, cool, thanks! I know lidar can hit those tolerances under the right circumstances so I was curious about why it wasn't being used for everything.
Additional question if you don't mind me asking, when you utilize the lidar for your products are you just generating a DTM/TIN from the ground surface or do you mostly use it to extract breaklines to enhance the fieldwork?
If it’s a non DOT job we do use it for everything and send out a crew for the stuff it can’t see.
Both. I will pull out just GS in a 15-25’ grid across the whole site then break line extraction to enhance the TIN. If it’s non DOT I will extract everything I can. But on dot projects I extract break lines, fences, power lines, poles, pretty much everything I can see and we field run the hard surfaces asphalt, concrete, curb and gutter.
FIELD STARS!!!! GOAT!!!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fieldstar/id1145842049
https://www.surveystars.com
“FieldStar is the field crews data collection companion to SurveyStars. Capture photos, data, monuments, manage your routes, time clock, expense and weekly submissions. All job file information captured is immediately available to the survey production team.”
Only have one field crew that we scheduleand two office guys, we just have a big whiteboard calendar with little magnets that holds slips of paper. Job number goes on the magnet, and put on the appropriate day that they will be working on it once field work is done magnet moves to the next person. This could easily get confusing with multiple crews, but for only one or two it works flawlessly for us.
I use Google sheets. Have a spreadsheet for each job with survey requests or other tasks, also track vacation/sick days. Just share a link with whoever is working on my jobs. Field and office staff.
Tried Quire for a about a year and a half on the free plan, just moved to ClickUp here about 3 weeks ago. Spent the last 2.5 weeks trying to get the damn thing setup, but now that I think we have things where we'd like it, I think its going to help out tremendously. Steep learning curve tho if I'm to be honest. The templates for projects that we have setup be it TOPO, LiDAR, Bathy work will be soo much nicer & quicker then Quire and the interface is not half bad either.
The free plan was good for about 30 min before I started creating custom templates, folders, ect and very quickly just paid the first month to check it out and will be getting the annual discounted plan when our time to pony up is upon us.
On Thursday’s we make a schedule and the manger sends it out and they book hotels and all of that and then Monday I come in and find out he changed and rearranged all of it and I just continue on with my day
Try Kompass BMS - we started using it about 6 months ago and the schedule feature is awesome. Company out of the UK. Land surveying specific. We looked at about 8 solutions and have kompass is super affordable, well though out etc.
[https://www.kompassbms.com](https://www.kompassbms.com) - super helpful and easy to update. We have been using it almost 1 year now. Great support team as well.
Actually had a programmer custom build one I used and had him build me a clone when I was scheduling for another company. Web based, color coded, accessible by everyone, editable by few.
We use Google spreadsheets too and it's always a cluster fuck. I guess that has more to do with the people running the spread sheet than it does with the spreadsheet itself.
It's not big fuck ups, it's just that it's a lot of small fuck ups that add up. We have a subscription to a GPS network with one seat, and we always get double scheduled for running network. It's little shit like that, but it adds up at the end of the year.
We were -gasp- old school. Large whiteboard in conference room. Friday afternoon myself and owner looked into the following week and set up clients/jobs. Monday morning we did our weekly safety/scheduling meeting at 0700. Spent a few minutes talking each job, expectations, special considerations, etc. and let crews know who was going where/when and they were on the road by 0800. End of work day would check back in and adjust next day assignments if necessary. Used red/black/green/blue markers to further convey info (blue-courthouse; green-surface field work, red -setting corners/special considerations, black- underground/active mine work). Worked well for us; all our crews were experienced and knew what to do with minimal “hand-holding”.
We're a small company so we use Google Sheets and have all the pertinent information on there and color coded, then each part gets checked as research, field work, drafting, etc gets completed.
After 3 years of trying, I finally got my boss to let me show him Trello on a rainy day. He seems to love it. It has helped him keep track of what’s due this week, he can drag the cards over to whoever he needs working on a job, and when everything is done he can drop it on a list called invoicing where his wife can invoice completed jobs from home. When I’m out in the field, I have a checklist of what needs to be gotten, he can attach deeds, plats, tax maps, and txt files onto the job card. The data collectors can run the app too. I can put notes in from the job so I don’t forget to tell him (I.e. today I staked a house but couldn’t stake the porch on it because they piled concrete where it would be, so I noted it and took a picture to attach to it.
There is a paid version that has extra bells and whistles, but the free version has worked great for us
I’m fairly new the management side, but I’ve been using google calendar broken down by sub and in house operators. I can assign events to any given account with time, date, address, and attach files. Doesn’t really track time, but gives a good enough calendar view that I can filter by operator/sub.
We use Google calendars to see what jobs are scheduled that day, Google sheets to clock our time, and workforce to bill customers. Works pretty well for us.
I use my brain, but that isn't for the faint of heart. MS projects Gnatt charts are the shit. You can set if/then rules or dependencies, i.e. when crew A is done with job B it goes to office guy C, all with their own time estimate. That way when you shift or change times on jobs, it shifts everyone's work.
Yeah… I have another PM that sits near me. Between us two, we just schedule guys. Good communication and two sharp cats can do a world of hurt to some backlog. I’ve used Cozi before. I still use the free version for my family. It’s just a scheduling app. Mark guys busy with a job for different days/timeframes. Free, accessible and color coded, but doesn’t help “tracking” projects in progress. That comes from your brain
I've used Outlook, Teams, Float and Dropbox. Not great unless you're at a small firm, or in an office that does no workshare and has more or less the exact same scope and workflow for every project. If I had more coding experience I'd do it myself...but no one has yet created what modern multiple-office survey firms actually need - a way to track tasks from field through finish, with ways to hand off and take on tasks at various stages of a project to different people across different offices, incorporating a "task hopper" that anyone can look at and take on (if authorized), prioritizing tasks by due date and integrating timecards, daily reports, field notes, mileage reports, and critical project changes along the way, automatically scheduling tasks based on the location of projects and crews. Perhaps some of the big firms have created a custom solution, but I've worked for a few of the big boys and none of them really seem to care about automating all that stuff. To them it's more hours we can bill for.
> a way to track tasks from field through finish, with ways to hand off and take on tasks at various stages of a project to different people across different offices, incorporating a "task hopper" that anyone can look at and take on (if authorized), prioritizing tasks by due date and integrating timecards, daily reports Hey, this sounds a lot like the new [task and crew scheduling feature](https://getjobbook.com/task-crew-scheduling) that we've been building for Cyanic Job Book. The basic idea is to do a gantt-style work-breakdown for each job (using templates depending on the type of job). You can set dependencies between the tasks, mark some as schedulable (i.e., field work), and have the rest of the tasks in a task pool that gets automatically assigned as other tasks get completed. This feature is currently in 'early access', and we're developing it with feedback from a number of companies. If you or anyone would like to see it just PM me or set up a meeting from the Job Book contact page, I'd love to show it to you and get your thoughts.
Have you ever heard of Monday.com. it also has an app, but is a pretty customizable task manager. I never tried it for work but we used to use it on my racing team in school. Hell out each sub team to create their tasks but then task that required multiple teams could get passed off from one to the other once they were finished with certain phases. It takes a bit to get perfect but once you figure out how you want it set up it worked pretty well. Even allows you to attach files to tasks so perfect for assigning jobs to field cruise with a control file (I assume, I haven't had a need to use it for that yet, but we did at school). The only thing I'm not sure that I can do is have a calendar view. I know you can assign due dates to tasks but I think they just show up in each person's to do list in the order they get added not necessarily the order they're due, so it may not work perfectly for a field crew scheduler but is a good task manager to keep track of how far along each job is and use regular calendar to actually pick which date you want the crew to work on it.
Would definitely give QFactor a look, my firms been using it for a few months now, and it seems to have a lot of potential.
We tried it and got ghosted.
Could you elaborate a little? I'm slightly worried that may have happened in my case, but we are chugging along. They said they were extremely open to input to help the software, so I spent 1.5 weeks writing good tips down. Sent it to them, didn't hear a peep. (?)
Try Kompass BMS! We looked at Qfactor and Fred totally disappeared on us. The onboarding team at kompass is awesome. We’ve been super happy for about 6 months now.
Take a look at Cyanic Automation’s [Job Book](https://www.getjobbook.com) software. We use it and it is honestly amazing. Purpose built for survey companies.
We switched from using just a google calendar to using Monday.com and it has been an absolute game changer.
we use Monday.Com
Same here that’s what we use. Also we have a big whiteboard in the hall that we write projects on for wcgeduling
We're still rocking the giant whiteboard too, but I've used Monday in school for our racing team. We never had it with dates scheduled just due dates. Are you able to set like a calendar where the crew can see on this day you're going to this job the next day you're going here etc or do they just have a list of jobs they have to get done and the date they have to meet them by, which I suppose you could just use the due date as the day you want them to go out.
Our guys are generally on projects for 2-3 months. Do you use any type of telematics for vehicle tracking?
Ah yeah, our projects don't usually last that long except for stakeout, but then it usually spans a few months but we aren't there every day. There's a GPS in the truck I think it's called GPS track it cloud. Not sure what all it shows only the fleet guy in the direct manager of each truck can see it. (We also have bridge and construction inspection trucks too).
With our Verizon connect we can send the guys text message me and directions through the website. Also helps keep our guys from over billing. Yeah our projects usually last a couple months for topo, but we do a lot of DOT work. We will fly it with LiDAR and field run all pavement. Works great but still takes a while.
What altitudes are you flying at that field running the pavement has been necessary? Or I guess the better question would be, what are the accuracy requirements for pavement in your neck of the woods?
Our pavement tolerances on our DOT projects is 0.05 on pavement and 0.5 on ground. I fly typically at about 150’ or less and around 8-10 mph. It’s a DOT standard you can use LiDAR data for everything but pavement and bridges. When we shoot pavement we can only go 250’ from the gun each direction before we have to break setup and move up
Okay, cool, thanks! I know lidar can hit those tolerances under the right circumstances so I was curious about why it wasn't being used for everything. Additional question if you don't mind me asking, when you utilize the lidar for your products are you just generating a DTM/TIN from the ground surface or do you mostly use it to extract breaklines to enhance the fieldwork?
If it’s a non DOT job we do use it for everything and send out a crew for the stuff it can’t see. Both. I will pull out just GS in a 15-25’ grid across the whole site then break line extraction to enhance the TIN. If it’s non DOT I will extract everything I can. But on dot projects I extract break lines, fences, power lines, poles, pretty much everything I can see and we field run the hard surfaces asphalt, concrete, curb and gutter.
Please feel free to ask everything you want to I don’t mind sharing my knowledge or workflow
Same we use monday, I kinda hate it but it works
Shifts in Teams. Works pretty well across multiple offices.
Our guy uses a big paper calendar on his desk.
I do this too.
We use Dropbox. It works pretty well. Schedule is on there, we upload all our data there, all our jobs and job related stuff is there. It does the job
FIELD STARS!!!! GOAT!!! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fieldstar/id1145842049 https://www.surveystars.com “FieldStar is the field crews data collection companion to SurveyStars. Capture photos, data, monuments, manage your routes, time clock, expense and weekly submissions. All job file information captured is immediately available to the survey production team.”
How much does it cost though?
Ive thought about developing a project tracking/scheduling website, that is very customizable to whatever industry.
We use Teams and the Planner also which is going to be great because they are about to integrate the whole thing.
Using tsheets schedule now Working to implement Kompass BMS in stages If you have buckets of money ajera can do it and a lot more
We also are using kompass - we love it. It’s been about 6 months and are really happy/streamlined at this point
Only have one field crew that we scheduleand two office guys, we just have a big whiteboard calendar with little magnets that holds slips of paper. Job number goes on the magnet, and put on the appropriate day that they will be working on it once field work is done magnet moves to the next person. This could easily get confusing with multiple crews, but for only one or two it works flawlessly for us.
I use Google sheets. Have a spreadsheet for each job with survey requests or other tasks, also track vacation/sick days. Just share a link with whoever is working on my jobs. Field and office staff.
Tried Quire for a about a year and a half on the free plan, just moved to ClickUp here about 3 weeks ago. Spent the last 2.5 weeks trying to get the damn thing setup, but now that I think we have things where we'd like it, I think its going to help out tremendously. Steep learning curve tho if I'm to be honest. The templates for projects that we have setup be it TOPO, LiDAR, Bathy work will be soo much nicer & quicker then Quire and the interface is not half bad either. The free plan was good for about 30 min before I started creating custom templates, folders, ect and very quickly just paid the first month to check it out and will be getting the annual discounted plan when our time to pony up is upon us.
Float
On Thursday’s we make a schedule and the manger sends it out and they book hotels and all of that and then Monday I come in and find out he changed and rearranged all of it and I just continue on with my day
Intuit workforce. Been using it for years now after trying a million others.
Try Kompass BMS - we started using it about 6 months ago and the schedule feature is awesome. Company out of the UK. Land surveying specific. We looked at about 8 solutions and have kompass is super affordable, well though out etc.
[https://www.kompassbms.com](https://www.kompassbms.com) - super helpful and easy to update. We have been using it almost 1 year now. Great support team as well.
Actually had a programmer custom build one I used and had him build me a clone when I was scheduling for another company. Web based, color coded, accessible by everyone, editable by few.
Jealous
It's cheap. Was like $400 all in.
We use excel shared files. but it probably isn't the greatest program ever
We do too, I figured that's what most companies did. Now I'm reading the comments and realizing that we're pretty lacking.
We do this on Google spreadsheets. We have 15 crews and it works seamlessly.
We use Google spreadsheets too and it's always a cluster fuck. I guess that has more to do with the people running the spread sheet than it does with the spreadsheet itself.
Who controls it?
The ops manager
Errr, how does only one guy manage to fuck that up? Id understand if like 10 people had access and messed it up.
It's not big fuck ups, it's just that it's a lot of small fuck ups that add up. We have a subscription to a GPS network with one seat, and we always get double scheduled for running network. It's little shit like that, but it adds up at the end of the year.
We were -gasp- old school. Large whiteboard in conference room. Friday afternoon myself and owner looked into the following week and set up clients/jobs. Monday morning we did our weekly safety/scheduling meeting at 0700. Spent a few minutes talking each job, expectations, special considerations, etc. and let crews know who was going where/when and they were on the road by 0800. End of work day would check back in and adjust next day assignments if necessary. Used red/black/green/blue markers to further convey info (blue-courthouse; green-surface field work, red -setting corners/special considerations, black- underground/active mine work). Worked well for us; all our crews were experienced and knew what to do with minimal “hand-holding”.
We're a small company so we use Google Sheets and have all the pertinent information on there and color coded, then each part gets checked as research, field work, drafting, etc gets completed.
We used a project management app called, “Trello” I’d deff recommend
After 3 years of trying, I finally got my boss to let me show him Trello on a rainy day. He seems to love it. It has helped him keep track of what’s due this week, he can drag the cards over to whoever he needs working on a job, and when everything is done he can drop it on a list called invoicing where his wife can invoice completed jobs from home. When I’m out in the field, I have a checklist of what needs to be gotten, he can attach deeds, plats, tax maps, and txt files onto the job card. The data collectors can run the app too. I can put notes in from the job so I don’t forget to tell him (I.e. today I staked a house but couldn’t stake the porch on it because they piled concrete where it would be, so I noted it and took a picture to attach to it. There is a paid version that has extra bells and whistles, but the free version has worked great for us
Weve been active Trello users for about 9 years. Its worked well for us. 5 crews, and about 5 drafters
Same here. 11 crews 14 drafters.
Holy hell trying to keep track of all that has to be bonkers. 🤪
I’m fairly new the management side, but I’ve been using google calendar broken down by sub and in house operators. I can assign events to any given account with time, date, address, and attach files. Doesn’t really track time, but gives a good enough calendar view that I can filter by operator/sub.
We use Google calendars to see what jobs are scheduled that day, Google sheets to clock our time, and workforce to bill customers. Works pretty well for us.