Before you start baking a cake, the first step is to make sure that you have the right amount of ingredients. If you fall short with any of the ingredients, your cake is sure to come out tasting a little bit odd.
The same is true with projects. If you don’t have enough resources to complete the projects it will not turn out as expected. To make sure that you have all the right ingredients you need- team members, skills, and tools used for the capacity planning process.
Companies not leveraging capacity planning are at a severe disadvantage. They not only lack understanding if they meet demand, but also have a short-sighted view of their opportunities to improve efficiency.
Overscheduled people, ad hocs tasks piling up, conflicting priorities, and complaining customers can all be the results of poor capacity planning. Effective capacity planning requires navigating the supply-demand relationship between how many resources you have and how much is required for the task completion. But determining these values is not a piece of cake. This is where capacity management tools help.
What is Capacity planning?
Capacity planning is the process of comparing your employees’ available working hours with the needs of the project so that you get a realistic picture of the goals that can be accomplished with your given resources. The goal of capacity planning is to have the right resource available when you need them. The resource here means- individuals with the right skills, and time available to add another project or the necessary budget.
In more general terms, capacity management is a process used to predict resource demands and then allocate them strategically. The primary goal is to match the demand with the supply within the budget, with the secondary goal of avoiding overspending on the allocating the resources that are not needed.
In a nutshell, the process of capacity management involves:
- Measuring current resources to drive the current performance
- Understanding what resource could be procured and how it will affect your current capacity
- Accounting for demand to utilize your capacity
- Strategically allocating resources to meet your desired level
- Recalibrating benchmark as you measure your current capacity and demand.
Why is resource capacity planning important?
Resource capacity planning is important to ensure that teams have the right people and monetary resources to deliver quality work within the defined time.
The lack of proper resource capacity planning can chip away at your project management efforts and ultimately drive the project into failure. Mentioned below systematic breakdown of how it can wreck your project:
- Poor resource capacity planning will lead to overworked and overscheduled employees with conflicting priorities and ultimately leading to exhaustion and burnout.
- Overworked and overscheduled employees have lower morales
- Low-quality work will be delivered creating a vicious cycle of work.
- This cycle will increase the time and cost of projects.
How do you do Capacity Management?
Capacity planning is also known as demand forecasting, this is the process of determining capacity requirements in the short or the long term and if you have enough resources available to meet those demands within the specific time frame.
Capacity planner mainly performs the following:
- Conduct a demand forecast: Determine what’s required to meet the upcoming demand of the project.
- Determine the required capacity: use the information to forecasted demands to estimate the required capacity.
- Calculate resource capacity: determine the capacity of your current team members over the periods you are planning for.
- Measure the gap: determine the gap between demand and resource capacity
- Align capacity and demand: If the capacity is more than demand then you can take on additional work or have to downsize the team. Whereas if demand is more than the capacity then you have to scale up the team for project completion and to meet the deadline.
How to choose the right capacity management tool?
There are different capacity management tools in the market and finding the right one depends on what you want to prioritize for your team. This means being monitored by someone who’s in the know can improve your results and squeeze out as much productivity from the business as possible. TO choose the right capacity management tool you need to know what you are looking for.
- Project forecasting report: a solid bedrock for capacity planning comes from the accurate forecasting of a project’s needs. With the help of insightful reports of the capacity planning tool, you can utilize your team members over time, both as a team and individual. You can use the data to decide to cover your current project needs and sign the new ones.
- Customizable permission: A flexible capacity management tool will offer permission settings so you can invite colleagues to the platform and give them a real-time view of available capacity within a given period.
- Resource scheduling: Consider your scheduling needs when choosing a capacity management tool. Do you need to schedule multiple resources for the same booking? Are you able to accommodate the schedules or need last-minute changes? Then you need a flexible tool that let you simply drag and drop and even split bookings.
- Clash management: This feature plays a most significant role in capacity planning because it stops you from overbooking your most important resources- employees. You need a system that helps you identify the clashes and inform you so that you can manage overtime dynamically.
- Leave management: Sick leave, a personal day off, and other leaves can have a sudden and unexpected impact on your capacity, so a tool with a leave management feature will help you keep updated. Daily time off emails, holiday planners, and detailed reports of your staff absence makes your capacity planning process much stronger.
- Equipment management: employees generally need tools to perform their job. On-site equipment use may have decreased during the covid 19 but the resurgence of hybrid work means that these needs are coming to play again. Capacity Management tools gives you a bull’s eye view of equipment booking is perfect to save time and provide everyone with the resource they need.
Compare different capacity planning tools before you choose. Some Capacity Management tools are highly specific and focus only on capacity planning and resource management.
eResource Scheduler is the master solution. It helps you to put an end to over-allocated resources and remove the friction from resource management so that you can keep your projects running smoothly.
And it’s not just for scheduling people, the capacity management tool also allows you to manage your non-human resources.
Key Feature:
- Clash management, overtime booking, and waiting list
- Tentative scheduling
- Leave Management
- Project forecasting and resource utilization reports
- People and equipment scheduling
eResource Scheduler handles complex scheduling needs with a simple user interface that includes custom availability for individual resources, times zone, time off, and booking requests.
Pricing: Resource Management software can be incredibly expensive, but with prices from just $4, eResourceScheduler offers an affordable solution without compromising on features quality along with 14 days of free trial
