Capacity Planning – Making Good Use of Resources

“Who is available when?”

This is a question you cannot avoid in your company. The optimal planning of your resources is indispensable for the success of your projects. Only in this way can you ensure that you meet deadlines, your employees are not overbooked and you can win new orders.

For this reason, resource planning always revolves around the same questions: Can I handle the project on time? Do I have the right employees available for the tasks? Can I reschedule appointments or am I committed? And finally, how busy are my employees? Questions that initially sound relatively simple. Nevertheless, proper resource planning is a major challenge for many companies. Decision-makers often rely on gut feeling, or when planning does take place, the well-known Excel spreadsheet has to do the job.

But this is not the ideal solution either. Because for a functioning scheduling of your resources there is a lot of important background information that needs to be taken into account. What working hours do the individual employees have? Are employees on vacation or absent due to illness? To what percentage is an employee already scheduled? To answer such questions, an appropriate tool must be used.

Resource planning, yes – but how?

If you decide to take the important step of scheduling your resources as well as possible, the question immediately arises of how you want to build up your resource planning. Because as with many things, there are different ways here too. It always comes down to what questions you want to get answers to.

For example, the question arises as to whether you only need a rough overview of your employees’ workload, or whether your planning needs to be much more granular and detailed. Resource planning should therefore be oriented to your work processes.

For the resource planning tool, this in turn means that it must offer flexible configuration options and different views. This flexibility is what the new capacity planning in projectfacts aims to provide. Long-term, rough planning as well as short-term, detailed settings. In the following we look more closely at the first version of capacity planning in projectfacts.

Why “capacity” and what is a capacity?

While the term “resource” is ubiquitous, projectfacts uses the term “capacity” instead. Why? And what is the distinction?

While an employee represents a resource, a capacity in projectfacts is not limited to a single employee. At the same time, an employee can have multiple capacities. How you use capacities and how many you use is ultimately up to you.

A capacity is initially a superordinate unit that is detached from the project. A capacity can have a time budget, a start and end point and assigned employees, among other things. Then it is time for the actual scheduling.

Capacity planning – Multiple usage options

What usage options are now available to you with the new capacity planning? The first version of capacity planning offers a clear scheduling of employees independent of projects. For this reason, different usage options are available to you that are adapted to your company’s situation:

One capacity equals one project:

• In this case, the capacity is almost congruent with the project. While you perform your structural planning in the project, you schedule your employees in the capacity. Consequently, employees are in multiple capacities, since they can also be in multiple projects.

One capacity per employee:

• Each employee has one capacity. The capacity thus symbolizes the total workload of an employee across all their activities.

One capacity per team or area of responsibility:

• A capacity could for example also symbolize the workload of a development team. This way you can view the workload of all employees assigned to the team in the capacity.

Ultimately, usage is completely individual and is not fixed to one scenario. Either way, you can always get an overview of specific employees or teams.

Maintenance of capacities is also freely usable. The project manager or department head can do the scheduling, or the employee can do it for themselves.

Because capacities exist independently of projects, you can also use them, for example, when creating quotes or for advance planning.

Scheduling can be done either roughly on a monthly basis or with a focus on the respective day with an hourly view.

Depending on the work process in your company, different results come into play:

• For a management consultancy whose consultants are engaged with clients for extended periods, capacity planning provides quick information on availabilities over the long term.
• For an IT company with dynamic software development, the fine-grained mapping option provides up-to-date daily information on the availability and workload of individual developers.

Feature overview

Below you will find an overview of the feature set of the first version of capacity planning in projectfacts. The following three sub-menus can be set in the project module:

Capacities

• Capacities can be created and maintained here
• Beyond that, this tile provides an overview of all capacities that you have access to
• Each capacity has its own detail manager through which the capacity can be edited
• Editing encompasses on the one hand the master data of the capacities and on the other hand the actual scheduling of employees in the deployment plan

My Capacities

• This tile provides you with an overview of all capacities to which you are assigned

Capacity Analysis

• Graphical overview in the form of a calendar view of all capacities
• This allows workload to be identified and potential conflicts to be viewed

Now you can get started. Use capacities to optimally schedule your resources. If you still have questions about the setup and how it works, simply contact us.