Capacity and Staff Planning

Capacity and Staff Planning

The Capacity and Staff Planning capability supports analyzing the pipeline of opportunities and incoming engagements to make appropriate staffing adjustments, so all projects will meet contractual obligations. Each capability within the Planview Capability Framework has a distinct set of features and functionality, business processes, best practices, and analytics and reports that deliver value to customers in the form of specific business outcomes.

Definition and Business Value

Definition

  • Provides detailed visibility into the resources required for incoming opportunities and current projects to determine future capacity needs.
  • Identifies and quantifies all incoming demand placed against resources to maintain a balanced and efficient work capacity.
  • Provides a comprehensive view into resource work capacity, utilization, and distribution by team, job title, and individual.

Business Value

We can flex our staffing approach and project schedule based on changing demand to optimize resource distribution.

Business Value

We can accurately plan for future engagements, ensuring they have the resources and capacity to deliver work against customer deadlines.

Business Value

We can analyze how incoming projects may impact staffing distribution and capacity within the context of our existing portfolio of active projects.

Business Value

We can quickly identify capacity constraints as engagements are won and reallocate resources to meet delivery requirements.

Business Value

We can optimize staff utilization by identifying the right people with the right skills for the project.

Best Practices

Organize capacity pipelines

Viewing the organization’s capacity through the lens of a single resource hour pipeline will lead to some resources being overutilized and others being underutilized. Sort resources into smaller pipelines that fit your organization’s operating model such as regions, departments, practices, or teams to help account for the different types of work that exist.

Prioritize mid-range forecasting

For organizations focused on billable work, demand will fluctuate over time, with the organization adjusting the capacity and staffing plan to match the changes in demand. Visibility and accuracy are crucial for this planning to be effective. Ensure you can correctly forecast demand six to eight months in advance so the organization can grow or shrink resource capacity and account for the impacts of hiring or contract decisions.

Establish partner resources

Services organizations typically do not want to turn away opportunities, instead adding additional capacity using a mix of full-time employees, contractors, and consultants to match demand as it increases or decreases. Having a pre-established relationship with partners included in the capacity plan allows the organization to adjust the utilization of these different types of resources as demand changes or disruptions occur.

Strategically overestimate

When calculating resource capacity and forecasting velocity within a services organization, it can be beneficial to slightly overestimate capacity, especially if mid- to long-range forecasting is accurate. Overestimating – within reasonable bounds – ensures that the organization always takes in the maximum demand, helps maintain relationships with consultant and contractor partners, and allows the organization to identify steady trends that justify growing the organization’s staff.

Expect and alleviate disruption

In services organizations, surprise sales and increasing scope are constant possibilities. Project managers should always be prepared to revisit the staffing plan to alleviate this potential for disruptions, usually by assigning established contractor and consultant partners or by looking across the organization for resources with the most availability.

Generate consistent reporting

Having access to reliable and up-to-date information means that leadership can make informed decisions when planning, prioritizing, and reprioritizing work. Reports and dashboards can provide quick, real-time visualizations to help with planning and prioritization, calling attention to staffing issues that require resolution.

Processes and Reports

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Capacity and staff planning enables professional services organizations to remain flexible and respond rapidly to changing demand. Organizations can use robust capacity and demand data to make staffing decisions based on the opportunity pipeline to maximize their capacity and throughput.

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Capacity and Staff Planning Process Steps

           

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Capacity and staff planning process flow

Process Step Description
Adjust staffing levels by enabling groups

Assess the resource availability and capacity of user groups over time by resource group, job title, or user in the Capacity Planning view. You can assess your user group’s capacity and utilization as a whole or by individual members for deeper analysis. Capacity is represented as FTEs, working hours, or person days.

User groups are configured by the administrator and are available to one or more resource managers designated for those groups. For example, a user group configured for the North America West Region would exclude other regions.

For more information:
Monitor projects

Review the data visualizations in the Capacity Planning tab to monitor how your resources are distributed and utilized, both currently and over time. You can track active and requested projects, display resource capacity, and view resource utilization as a percentage of the total capacity.

For more information:
Adjust staff allocations based on demand

Adjust how your resources are distributed by reviewing open requests, remaining availability, and the total capacity of assigned and unassigned resources to determine where resources are needed most at a given time. In the Reports tab, you can view the Utilization report to compare estimated versus actual utilization by month and task.

You can view and use resources from other groups and subgroups if your current resources are fully utilized. If your resources don’t have the skills required for a project, you can filter and select resources by their skillset. Discuss resource requests with the project manager using the Discussions feature.

For more information:
Shift project dates and durations

If appropriate, you can shift your project’s start and end date to maximize resource capacity and adapt to changing plans. Staffing requests and project assignments shift relative to new start dates, so make sure to manually update these if needed. You can customize rules to automate resource shifting when you adjust start or end dates.

For more information:

                       

           

Capacity and Staff Planning Reports

There are several standard resource load and utilization reports in the report library. These can be run with specific filters to see the appropriate resourcing information. See the Resource Utilization Report for more information.

Additional reports and dashboards can be created by the administrator and shared with the organization and appropriate team members. 

           

Related Capabilities

Supported Solutions

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