HowToUseCapacityPlanning

version 1.11.0 or higher

How to use the capacity planning form

Very often during the project life-cycle it is common to define floating allocations to resources caused by shared projects or other reasons. In Plandora, the project leader is able to setup the "planned" resource capacity that can be useful to estimate a better allocation configuration.

The resource planning form is accessible by project leader at My Projects grid (figure 1).

The form contains some fields that filter information of project allocation. For example, it is possible to show allocations for a specific project (figure 2), in order to view the estimated capacity for all resources. It is also possible to show allocations for a specific resource, in order to view how many time the resource must work in each project.

The capacity planning can be displayed daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly and can be defined based to an initial date (milestone). Once set, an allocation will be considered indefinitely until the next configuration (milestone) change the allocation (figure 3).

The task form used by leader to assign tasks to resources uses the definitions of Capacity Form. For example, if a specific resource was set to work 20 minutes (in average) for a specific project in a period of time, and the leader creates a task with 1 hour of duration (figure 3), the system will allocate 3 days of work with 20 minutes in each "bucket" (figure 4).

The form contains 3 different view modes. The mode "Estimated Capacity and Used Capacity" is particulary useful to check how assertive is the planned capacity in comparison with actual capacity. In this view, Plandora will display bullets to show the deviation between the capacities. A green bullet when the deviation is lesser than 5%, a yellow bullet when the deviation is between 5% and 25% and a red bullet when the deviation is greater than 25%.

Additional considerations

The costs of resources in each project can be also defined using this form and following the rules. The costs will be used by system to calculate the accumulated HR expenses at Cost Form, reports and gadgets.

Limitation: The upper bound of a day-work (used for overload purposes) is 8h. In another words, the system does not blocks the leader to set a capacity greater than 8h, but the overload rules (at GUI) will consider 8h with the maximum time to work per day.