Release Notes: June 12, 2024

Combined Heat Map Live

What we've built: A clearer, all-encompassing view of your resources

We’ve developed a new way for you to visualize your resources, their utilization and components. With this new edition of the people schedule heatmap, you can now seamlessly observe the demand for resources across both task assignments and project allocations - portfolio-wide!

Historically, Forecast gave you the ability to review utilization and capacity of resources in the people schedule heatmap through the lens of:

• What task assignments make up my resource utilization OR
• What project allocations make up my resource utilization

There was never an ability to view your people schedule heatmap through both of the above simultaneously; with this update, that's now possible.

What this means for you

We've built this functionality to ensure all our clients, regardless of how they work, can understand to the greatest level of detail, their capacity and utilization portfolio-wide in real-time.

Old People Schedule Functionality

Before today, when using the people schedule heatmap, the task assignment view worked well for those with well-defined tasks scoped in detail (detailed and specific tasks to be carried out in the short to medium term, perhaps for fixed-fee engagements).

Project allocation mode works well for clients conducting resource management at a more ‘high level’, such as committing resources to work on a project for weeks or months (perhaps a retained client).

New People Schedule Functionality

A mode of the People Schedule heatmap that can show the true utilization of resources across both project allocations and task assignments simultaneously. The heatmap has a dropdown to select between project allocation view, task-based view or the newly created combined view.

New Utilization Report Functionality

Customers using the combined resourcing mode will also have additional data categories in the Utilization Report. Figures reflecting a mix of task assignments and allocations will be available in Planned, Remaining and Forecasted data categories. For each project the resource demand will be calculated based on which is higher between task estimates vs allocations.

Why This Matters

This puts together, in one single view, the complete picture of resource demand, no matter what kind of demand it is. Not only does this combine task and project based demand, it also covers both soft and hard allocations.

Therefore, you can use the view to understand the current demand on your resources and map future demand into the business’ schedule to proactively avoid bottlenecks and understand capacity. Having a single view of demand also means it doesn’t matter if you have several different commercial agreements or ways of working across the business, your resource management can still all be done in one place, via this single source of truth that is the combined people schedule heatmap.

This functionality will help you answer questions like:

• What makes up the utilization of my resources?
• Do I need to shift allocations around to make better use of the team I have?
• How busy will my team be?
• Is there a risk of capacity shortage?
• Is there a growing need to hire?

We're incredibly excited to offer this functionality; it's been asked for numerous times in the past year as our clients grow, expand and experience increased complexity in resource management. We hope it benefits your business hugely!