Capacity planning at a company level
Aligning project demand with your team’s capacity is an essential part of project management efforts, but strategic capacity planning benefits the whole organization, not just the production teams. Managing a broad portfolio of projects, you shouldn’t forget about capacity management. It will allow you to make better resource allocation decisions but also support other parts of your company:
- HR teams have a clear overview of recruitment needs and get enough time to hire or train new employees. Capacity planning helps to avoid resource bottlenecks in the future.
- Sales teams get more visibility into the production pipeline, so they know whether there’s room for more projects in a given period.
- Finance specialists can calculate profit forecasts based on the planned capacity and actual projects assigned to the staff.
Think: Does your company have established procedures for too much or too little team capacity? If not, raise this issue during your next project management team meeting. Perhaps you can figure out solutions like R&D initiatives for when you have available employees and no projects to work on? After all, underutilization is not great for employee morale.
Protect your employees with capacity planning
Capacity planning is appreciated by the employees, too. Such a strategic approach to resource management means that team members are not expected to work over their capacity. On top of that, employees know that their availability is visible and respected by the managers. They’re not likely to get assigned to an urgent project in the middle of their summer vacation.
Finally, if your company uses a resource management app, your employees know what’s coming in their schedule: what’s the next project they will be working on, how long it will take, etc.
Plan your team’s capacity with ease!
We hope that this article convinced you that capacity planning is both manageable and necessary. Forget about checking your team’s capacity, and your project is at risk: you’re not likely to deliver it on time without having enough qualified people. At the same time, you may exceed your budget if you end up outsourcing extra workforce. Luckily, both scenarios can be avoided when you compare capacity with demand. Remember about leveraging resource management software to make the whole process more robust.
Want to see how simple capacity planning is with Teamdeck? Book a consultation with one of our customer success experts. We’ll show you how you can make better strategic decisions thanks to effective resource management.