Capacity Management – Successfully Schedule Resources

Capacity Management – Achieve all company goals through efficient resource planning

Successful resource planning can be much more than a simple overview of your employees’ workload. In the following we would like to show you how, with the extended capacity management in projectfacts 6.5, you can not only fulfill your customer orders on time but also successfully implement your company’s strategic goals.

In addition to this blog entry, you can find more detailed information in our method video.

To the method video

The challenge of capacity management

In most companies there are more tasks than necessary resources. In practice, decisions therefore have to be made regularly about what work can and should be done. Usually the things that are sacrificed are internal projects such as improvements or further developments. In the short term, their loss can often be tolerated, but in the long term this can become a fateful question, because competitors overtake you in terms of technology, quality and service.

With simple project management, in which priority, planned effort and executing employees are used, this problem cannot be resolved. This type of planning is often very inflexible. If an already existing schedule needs to be adjusted, this often has far-reaching effects beyond the actual project. The increased resource requirement has to be offset elsewhere. You quickly become someone who is driven, putting their own strategic company goals aside and only reacting. While customer projects keep running, your own company stagnates. Employees also suffer under increased pressure, feeling rushed and overwhelmed.

What should successful capacity planning look like?

Here’s a small thought experiment: in private life it is common to mentally divide household income into small budget pots for various individual purposes, such as rent, food, insurance, retirement provision, clothing and pocket money. Each of these items is allocated a budget that can be used exclusively for its financing. This ensures that all needs can be covered at the end.

This idea can be applied to capacity planning in the company. Before the actual project management begins, one first looks at the available working time of all employees. The total of this represents the maximum available capacities. The company’s resources are then divided into smaller capacity slices according to overarching company goals and prioritized. Now all that remains is to determine the resource requirement for each individual goal.

Planning can then be carried out on the basis of available resources and capacity requirements. Planning on a monthly basis is most suitable.

For everyday work life, the described steps could take place within a department heads meeting. Here capacities are scheduled according to needs. Afterwards, there is a discussion with the employee about which capacities they should fulfill in the coming month. A joint comparison of planned and actually worked hours from past months is also recommended here. This makes it possible to refine future planning and thus even free up unused resources. Through joint planning, the employee knows which priorities await them in the next month, and the supervisor knows which resources they can count on. Monthly planning has the advantage of enabling a sufficiently high degree of flexibility, through which employees can independently manage the daily distribution of their tasks, as long as all tasks are completed by the end of the month. This way you can achieve all your goals and always have sufficient capacity to develop your company strategically.

How does projectfacts help?

With projectfacts you can map your company goals in the form of capacities and assign each the determined resource requirement. You can link the capacities to projects, whether external orders with budgets and schedules, or your internal strategic projects. You can then assign employee resources to the capacities for their implementation. At the same time you see the resulting workload for your colleagues. In our example we stick to monthly planning.

In order to be able to specifically schedule all the resources of your company, projectfacts displays all employees with the assigned capacities and the resulting workload. Through the project assignment, it is also shown which project still has what upcoming requirements and what the current schedule looks like in the future. Furthermore, it is shown how far the project gets with the current capacity assignment, i.e. which work packages would be completed by when with the current scheduling.

projectfacts provides you with all the necessary views and reports for efficient monthly capacity planning:

• Projects can forecast their own future progress with the assigned resources.
• Employees see what needs to be done and how many resources they have for which activity
• Department heads get an overview of which resources are scheduled and which are still free
• Company management receives a forecast of what income can be expected with the current resource distribution.

Benefits for your employees

For employees, using capacities does not mean any additional effort. Scheduling in projects and time tracking remain the same. In addition, however, the employee now receives an overview of whether they are achieving their set goals and at the same time has the opportunity to plan their month to the day. The new capacity planning also helps to identify early on when goals cannot be achieved and to take the necessary steps in good time.

Further information is available from your consultant.

A detailed description of our method can be found in the following video