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What’s the ultimate goal of project managers? Delivering their projects successfully. PMs themselves admit that this doesn’t happen very often: according to the latest Pulse of the Profession survey, less than 60% of projects are completed either on time or within their original budget.

What will you get from this article:

Effectively managing resource capacity can help companies increase these numbers. In this article, you’ll learn more about resource capacity planning in project management, but we’ll also touch on the advantages of company-level capacity management. Let’s start with some necessary definitions.

resource capacity planning software during his process of use
Skills-based searching and assigning people to tasks [Screen from resource planning software]

What is resource capacity planning?

Without making an unnecessary introduction, capacity refers to the ability to achieve, perform, or produce. If we use the company’s perspective, it means the ability to achieve or produce within a specific dose of time. But, if we dig deeper and use an operational point of view, we’ll find out capacity is understood as an amount of the input resources available to produce relative output over a period of time – we can read on managementstudyguide.com.

But it’s not the only meaning related to the topic of this chapter. Let’s compare a few other understandings of capacity planning.

On Projectmanager.com we read capacity planning is a process that stabilizes the available resources to meet requests or the task’s capacity necessities. Which can be comprehended as some kind of being between someone who has the access to sufficient resources and demands from projects and its expectations related to resources.

It seems Saviom – our competitors in the resource capacity planning software market – also shares the same view:

Resource capacity planning is forecasting the gap between the capacity and the demand for resources.

From Mavenlink’s perspective, resource capacity planning assumes 3 aspects of this process. First, defining how much work resources are able to do. Second, identification and an indication of what kind of work can those resources do. The third one – matching from this group those resources with currently used resources to meet project expectations and demands.

As we can read on Wrike’s blog:

Capacity planning is the process of anticipating the future business requirements of an organization or client. Capacity planning also aims to ensure resources with the necessary skill sets are made available to address evolving client and business demands

From this perspective – which also represents our approach – resources don’t mean equipment, software, laptops, construction materials, rooms, budget, and so on. When you look for capacity planning in project management you see the individual, the team member, and the employee. You see the individuals with a particular set of skills. Somebody with the relevant skills necessary to meet the requirements of a project.

project manager with particular set of skills
Capacity planning is about ensuring resources with an appropriate, particular set of skills

At a project level, capacity planning is all about determining whether you have enough resources to complete a given project. Its role is to make sure the company (or association) has the expected resources required for a project or task, expected at a predicted time, that are able to finish the project with the expected requirements at the expected point of time.

To say more, the resource capacity planner has to be able to give a clear overview of how many resources are needed to achieve an indicated goal (a subtask, a task, a project).

In other words, resource capacity planning is about predicting the interval between the capacity and the demand for resources. So, the ones in control of capacity planning are going to take into account factors such as working hours, mastery, skills, and the average throughout of work. In order to calculate your team’s capacity, you need to know their availability and their current workload.

Best resource capacity planner in use
One of the steps from the resource capacity planning process [Screen from Teamdeck]

What’s the difference between capacity planning and resource planning?

To say it straightforwardly: if comparing capacity planning to resource planning (or resource management), the first one can be reduced to “anticipating future business requirements and making sure we have required resources to start a project“. While resource planning is “choosing and assigning specific resources for and during a project or task”.

Can be also said, that capacity planning is the doing of inspecting whether the team members, roles, and mastery needed are undoubtedly available to do the incoming work before actually scheduling the work comes. While resource planning is choosing, assigning, and scheduling from this selection box.

Differences between resource planning and resource capacity planning process
The comparison of capacity planning, resource planning, and resource scheduling. [Source: www.kelloo.com]

Resource planning is more about coordinating the workforce in real-time: you’re assigning people to projects while monitoring resource utilization. As we see, resource planning means the management, leadership, and coordination of the resources needed to complete a task or project.

Three steps for successful resource capacity planning

What do you usually do when you are assigned to manage a new project? How do you put together a team and make sure your team members’ availability is enough to complete all of the tasks? Project managers trying to ensure they have sufficient resources at their disposal should complete the following steps:

  1. Gather project requirements and estimates. You need to understand what has to be done to deliver the project successfully. What is the technical scope? Which roles are necessary for the project team? What are the time estimates for this project?
  2. Identify available resources. Analyze resource availability and determine which people who fit your project’s criteria can join your project team.
  3. Align capacity with project needs. Decide who will be assigned to the project and how many hours they should be booked for. Ideally, you should reserve these resources, even if your project doesn’t start yet.

Note: in some companies, the resource manager will be responsible for the bulk of the capacity planning process. The project manager is asked to request specific roles or skills, and the resource manager will analyze resource capacity. 

Grab resource requirements to introduce project resource plan

Leverage resource capacity planner for capacity requirements

Project managers should be able to assess the requirements of their projects, but analyzing resource availability could be more challenging without visibility into the employee pool. Fortunately, organizations often have a resource capacity planner at their disposal, which can streamline the whole project resource management process, effectively work on multiple projects and prepare long-term capacity planning strategies.

Resource capacity planners, such as Teamdeck, provide you with a single resource pool with information about everyone’s availability and workload (read about workload management). As a project manager, you can filter out the roles necessary to meet your project’s demands and check when these people are available.

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Resource calendar in capacity planning solution
A company-wide resource calendar is a key tool for successful capacity planning.

In order to avoid resource conflicts, you can book selected team members in advance. If your project is not yet 100% confirmed, you can add tentative bookings. Other project managers will see that these people are likely to be assigned to your project if it ends up happening. Once you get a green light, you’ll have a group of people ready to start working on the project plus a schedule visible to other managers in your company’s resource management app.

Insight into team members is the part of the strategic planning
Add tentative bookings to plan your project’s schedule well in advance.

Resource management software makes it easier to assess resource capacity. Not only can you see whether people have already been assigned to other projects, but you can also take their vacations or bank holidays in your account. You will be able to calculate your team’s actual capacity and decide whether you’re ready to deliver the project in a proposed time frame.

You’ll also have a chance to take finances into account. Some resource management apps (including Teamdeck) allow you to store information about your team’s rates. Use Teamdeck’s reports to calculate how much money you need to allocate in the budget to secure the staff you want to book for your project. Before you commit to this team, make sure you can afford them with your current project budget. Cross-checking resource capacity with estimated costs is yet another way to ensure your project’s success. 

An employee hours and estimated cost
Teams capacity and hours spent by each team members
Both teams have sufficient capacity to deliver a given project. The estimated costs, however, differ significantly. Fortunately, you can assess multiple scenarios with Teamdeck.

Capacity planning should help you avoid overworking and underutilizing your team. It’s still useful, however, to regularly monitor resource utilization as the project kicks off. Check out our guide to measuring team utilization. Or – if you’re curious about aspects of project management – read the capacity planning tools and techniques article. 

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The real resource capacity planning include all the projects and available capacity or required capacity

Resource capacity planning at a company level

Aligning project demand with your team’s capacity is an essential part of project management efforts, but a capacity planning strategy 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 an extra workforce. Luckily, both scenarios can be avoided when you compare capacity with demand. Remember about leveraging project resource management software to make the whole process more robust.

Prioritize projects to have more resources, right resources for a new projects

Want to see how simple capacity planning is with Teamdeck? Schedule a call with Aniela, one of our customer success experts. She’ll show you how you can make better strategic decisions thanks to effective project resource management.

Looking for an effective resource capacity planning software?

Plan your team’s workload with ease – use the resource capacity planner selected by NTT Data, Hill-Knowlton, and Stormind Games.

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