How did we get here? Why the name shopload?

I had a problem. I was a functional manager at a large defense contractor. My growing section had dozens of employees working on a half dozen or more projects. We worked on proposals, internal research and development projects, and client-facing programs. The challenge, as a manager, was knowing who was allocated to which projects, part time or full time to a project, how long those projects went, and when I needed to go find new work for my team. I had to sign up the organization for when we could execute a project which meant having answers to a lot of questions, including: When would we have the right resources available? Who wouldn’t be on vacation this December to work it? What would my burn rate be?

Flash-back: As an intern in college (pre-Y2K), I worked for a technology firm - one of their projects was a time-keeping system. They were developing a web/browser-based version which was novel in 1999 when my internship began. One of my mentors was the development DBA for the project - I learned data modeling from him, as he was flushing out the data structures for this project: projects, resources, budgets, actuals, divisions, businesses, etc.

Fast-forward to being an engineering manager: My boss asked me one day about my teams “shopload.” As an engineering firm that builds real things, your “shop” being busy or “fully loaded” meant you were profitable. I struggled to answer his questions with confidence.

As a software engineer, I wrote a LAMP stack, database-centric tool to solve my problem: manage projects and resources. I ran the app locally on my laptop. At any point in time, I knew who was working on what, when they were finished, which projects we were committed to work, and which were potentially going to happen. I could confidently commit my team to projects, justify hiring based on staffing requests, turn away work that we couldn’t execute, etc. In other words, I could manage my team with confidence.

Fifteen years later, I found myself consulting with an engineering director at a small, local firm who was facing the same problems that I had faced. I thought to myself: "Surely, somebody must have solved this problem". This class of software systems is now called “Resource Management.” But, I found those tools lacking… I wanted the features from my old PHP app with its fidelity, views, reports, graphs, drill-down navigation, exports, etc. We re-built it on a modern technology stack with a couple of important updates: multi-tenancy and security.

We are now pleased to offer a new resource management tool to the market: shopload.app.