Got a resource to share, Divvy it up!

Here at Click Engineering we do a lot of our troubleshooting and maintenance work remotely, i.e. from our desk in our office.  We subscribe to a service that makes it easy to create a remote connections to any computer with Internet access.  The only problem, only one technician can use the service at a time.  While conflicts are rare, there are occaisions when two of us will schedule a remote session with a client at the same time.

I’m sure you can think of similar resoures in your business that need to be shared and periodically lead to a conflict.  It may be a conference room, an office laptop, or perhaps even a staff member with specific skills.  Whatever the resource, you may be able to prevent scheduling collisions using Divvy.com.

Divvy is a free web-based service that allows you to share the calendar of a resource so that people can reserve time to use it.  You tell Divvy about the resource, its availability, the cost of reservation (if you wish to charge for it), what questions you want to ask the reserver before committing the reservation etc.  Once defined you can specify who has access to the calendar to make reservations, or you can open it up to the world.

To help conceptualize the service let’s look at a couple of examples.  In the case of a conference room you may create an ‘item’ called ‘Conference Room’.  Availability could be restricted to office hours and calendar access granted to staff members only.  The reservation cost would be $0.  You could define a set of questions to ask such as ‘Do you require a projector during your session?’ or ‘How many people will be attending’, so that the room can be configured and set up appropriately.

Alternatively, perhaps you have a resource that you rent out, such as a piece of high tech diagnostic equipment, and you want to enable your clients to reserve time to use it at a fixed rate.  Again you create an item in Divvy, give it a name and define the times it is available.  You can then configure the rental fees and set up a payment mechanism using Paypal such that when your client reserves time with the equipment the rental fees are automatically collected on the spot – no accounts receivable!  The fee structure can be defined in detail including information such as minimum and maximum lead time, down time required between reservations, different rates for different users etc.  Finally you can ask Divvy to send an email reminder to the client and to you shortly before the reservation.

I’m sure with a little thought you can come up with a resource that would benefit from having it’s own schedule and maybe can even drive a little revenue for your business.  Pick a simple one and try Divvy for a little while to see if it is a good fit.  I predict that once it is adopted by your audience you will wonder how you ever managed to share resources without it.

Dave Ferguson
CEO, Click Engineering Inc.
www.clickeng.com
Twitter: clickceo