Establishing whether you need a capacity planning system | Capacity Planning: The issues and payoffs
INTRODUCTION. Imagine if the following things happen in the next hour:
A host of questions come to mind...
Can you be certain of knowing the impact on other projects?
Are you sure you have the resources to handle the new project?
What will the workload be on the team? Will people be overloaded? Will you need to hire?
And here’s what some call the ‘golden question’:
‘How much can you achieve with the resources you currently have?’
Today, it's one off the smartest questions you could possibly ask.
But these are tough questions, needing a great deal of information-digging and cross-functional data merging to pull it together. It’s hard to see the big picture when you’re looking at isolated pieces of data rather than a total Capacity Planning system.
What exactly is it? And how does it differ from resource management?
Capacity Planning is the process of evaluating what availability you have, and when.
Resource Management is the continuous assignment of people and other resources to projects, taking into account availabilities, skills, qualities and costs of the elements and how they map to the projects.
If you find it hard to pull all the capacity-related information together in your company, you’re not alone. Many project-led companies report having to wrestle with the following pain points. You might want to use this as a checklist to see if any apply to your company...
Every possibility of a new project seems to be a special case. So you hear colleagues say phrases like ‘It’s a new client. It should lead to more in the future’, and ‘It’s a new market sector. It’s bound to become a growth area for us.’ So cautions are regularly overruled.
It’s a convoluted task to manually cross-reference projects against people skills against team member availability against forecasts. To do it constantly is a major effort. The picture changes every day: priorities, client demands, unexpected problems, staff sickness – there’s never a shortage of complications. It’s no wonder that resourcing difficulties are often cited as a company’s biggest pain point.
Clients often request ‘just a little change’ without an increase in fee, resulting in continuous and barely documented feature-creep. The knock-on effect on other projects can be huge. Inexperienced team members are particularly prone to being leaned on in this way, wanting to keep customers happy but not being aware of the big picture.
The company manager of a 45-strong project-based company recently told us:
“It used to be a bun-fight in the studio to decide which job was going to get which resources. Imagine: over 20 people, and the one who shouts loudest wins. Not now: it’s all transparent. Everybody can see everybody else’s priorities and workload.”
All three are in constant flux and need to be managed. But in reality, your resources day-to-day aren’t very flexible at all. You can’t double your available specialist skills overnight. And the amount of time you have to complete projects is also not massively flexible in the short term. Clients are unlikely to want you to stagger projects over long periods simply because it suits your availability patterns.
So that leaves demand - the amount of projects you take on. It means that the golden question ‘How much can we achieve with the resources we have?’ becomes the one in the spotlight. Answer that right, and you’re in control.
So, what can you expect from getting the right capacity planning system?