Capacity Planning provides the ability to anticipate and plan project resourcing needs by scoping potential projects in your pipeline, connecting those projects to required resources, leveraging AI staffing suggestions and tentatively book team members. Evaluate what projects you can take on and when, with confidence. By using Capacity Planning you can clearly see overall work, plan for upcoming demand, staff projects effortlessly, hire at the right time, and set your team up for success.
This article covers:
What is Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is forecasting the gap between supply and demand to determine if you have sufficient resources to take on or complete a project at an organizational level. You can determine demand based on a specific skill set and role using placeholders. Creating placeholders allows you to identify demand for a specific resource role and skill and plan the work required to complete the project without having to assign the work to a specific team or resource. Once a project is won and demand is confirmed, Forecast helps you identify available resources and allows you to easily transfer the demand from the placeholder into a work allocation.
Capacity planning also allows you to create and manage soft and hard allocations assigned to your resources. The below table compares placeholders with project allocations.
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| Project allocation |
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Defining demand using Placeholders
A placeholder represents a generic resource demand on a project, is defined at the role level and is used instead of allocating a team member to a project until the project is won. Using placeholders allows you to work through high level project planning without allocating team members' time to projects. Placeholders can be used to represent individual team members or an entire team of resources. Once the project is won and the demand is confirmed, the placeholder is easily transferred into an allocation for a specific team member. For more on how to create and manage placeholders, see Creating and managing placeholders.
Soft Allocations
A soft allocation is an allocation type that is not yet confirmed and is not officially part of a team member's utilization. Soft allocations allow flexibility in future resource planning as the intent for the resource demand can be viewed in the heatmap as assigned to a specific team member. Soft allocations appear differently than hard allocations making them easily identifiable in the heatmap. They can also be included or excluded from the heatmap allowing different visual scenarios to be displayed.
Once demand is confirmed, soft allocations are easily transformed into hard allocations. With custom permissions, permissions can be set so only certain team members have the ability to change soft allocations to hard allocations. Check out Creating and Managing Custom Permission Profiles to understand how to provision this permission. To learn more about allocations, see Creating and editing allocations, to use hard and soft allocations, check out Using soft and hard project allocations.
Capacity Overview
Quick look: Resourcing > Capacity Overview
Capacity Overview provides the ability to analyze current capacity using the heat map, get a more realistic estimation of your resource needs by accounting for your pipeline’s win probability, view hard and soft allocations and see your available versus needed resources and group by roles to see where you may be under or over-booked.
By using Capacity Overview you will clearly see how many team member you have available and how many placeholder resources are needed giving you essential insights over your entire resource capacity. The view is grouped by roles and can be filtered to drill down to the relevant information.
Viewing capacity by win probability
As there is always a chance that not all projects in your pipeline will be won, Capacity Overview includes the option to view demand based on project win percentage. Toggle the option 'Use win probability' to view demand based on the project's win chance. This functionality is also available in Schedule People and Timeline.
Soft allocations and placeholder allocations will appear as a percentage of the overall demand based on the project's Win Chance. Hard allocations will not adjust based on win chance as they represent actual project work assigned to a team member.
For example, toggle on 'Use win probability' to see a 40h project demand adjust and appear as 20h for a project with a 50% chance of being won.
To learn more about how to use Capacity Overview for capacity planning, see Monitoring your resource utilization.
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