What is capacity planning?
Capacity planning is the strategic process of matching resource supply with demand.
In the case of service companies, this involves determining the resources needed to carry out future projects.
For example, with Teambook, you can visualize all your employees and projects on a timeline of 6 to 24 months. From what you know to date (your employees and current projects) to what you’re working on (planned commitments and your sales pipeline). This feature gives you an overview of your capabilities, enabling you to adjust your resources to match your projected workload.
Discover the benefits of using a capacity planning tool.
Supply and demand
Demand comes from your customers: the products or services they want you to provide.
The offer is your teams, i.e. the resources you need to deliver these services.
The two aspects of capacity management
1. Workforce capacity planning
It’s all about supply, and making sure you have enough people to handle your future workload. Teambook enables you, for example, to monitor the skills and availability of each employee, so you can assign the right people to the right projects.
2. Project capacity planning
This capacity represents the demand generated by the projects you plan to carry out over the coming months/years.
Teambook offers you utilities to spread the load over the coming months, using simple allocation rules.
The objective of capacity planning
The main objective is to avoid two costly problems:
- Insufficient resources leading to performance and delivery problems.
- An environment with excess capacity that wastes money.
Teambook’s Capacity module enables you to work on the 2 aspects (supply and demand) and thus, through iteration, effectively manage your organization’s medium-term needs.
Read our article on 5 mistakes to avoid in capacity planning.
A concrete example of capacity planning
An IT development agency wants to know if it can take on additional projects. Thanks to Teambook, it can :
- Visualize the current workload of your teams (= operational planning)
- Identify available skills
- Simply copy the operational plan to obtain a view of man-day capacity over the next few months. Then complete manually for the future.
- Compare these values with project requirements, which are simply entered and distributed over future months in Teambook.
- Teambook’s intuitive color-coded reporting system indicates critical paths (not enough resources to staff projects) or potential overcapacity (under-occupied resources).
This enables the company to take the right decisions: recruit, strengthen sales development, etc.
Capacity management vs. resource planning
Capacity planning is strategic – it gives an overview of all your projects. Resource planning is more tactical – focusing on tasks within projects. It’s often referred to as operational planning.
Why is capacity planning important?
Good capacity planning allows :
- Increase productivity and efficiency
- Deliver projects on time and on budget
- Identify new growth opportunities
- Improve transparency between departments
The benefits of capacity planning
- Increased project margins
- Greater project reliability
- Better management of skills and recruitment
- Intelligent resource allocation
- Improved staff retention
- Avoid the pitfalls of project management.
Capacity planning tools
Teambook offers several features to help you plan your capacity effectively:
- Synchronization (automatic or by copy) of operational planning with capacity
- Resource capacity management
- Project capacity management
- Capacity planning dashboards and charts
Conclusion: Optimize the management of your project resources
Resource management is essential to improving your organization’s productivity and efficiency. With an intuitive tool like Teambook, you can easily implement operational planning AND capacity management tailored to your needs.
Don’t hesitate to test Teambook free of charge to discover how it can benefit your business.
