Think of your project portfolio as a symphony orchestra. Each project is an instrument, and you are the conductor. To create perfect harmony, you need to know each instrument, its scope, its limitations, and how to get them to play together.
That's where the capacity plan comes in.
This essential tool allows you to optimize the allocation of your resources, to anticipate bottlenecks and to guarantee the success of your projects.
Ready to become the maestro of your own project orchestra? Immerse yourself in this article and its seven steps to creating your own capacity plan without a hitch.
The term “capacity plan” is the literal translation of “Capacity Planning.” It is a method whose objective is toalign the capacity available in the company (in terms of human and material resources) with the request.
This method thus makes it possible to assess, plan, and manage all resources to meet the full needs of your project portfolio.
To put it another way: it's a question of checking whether the workload that you ask your teams to carry out your projects passes to the teams or not, according to the tasks already planned in their schedule.
If many CIOs or PMOs use Capacity Planning, it is because it allows in particular to:
To dig deeper into the definition of the capacity plan, go to our article on the subject.
Looking for a concrete way to create your Capacity Planning? You've come to the right place: here are the seven steps you need to take to get an effective capacity plan that's as accurate as possible!
Good production capacity management must start with rely on the strategic vision of the company. The idea is to ask you what are the priorities, the projects that will bring the most value to the company over the coming period. It is this strategic direction that will then allow you to best orchestrate the resources at your disposal.
To do this, you will need to align all of your stakeholders (management and businesses) with these priorities. The goal: create a capacity plan that everyone agrees on.
Easy, on paper... but, in fact, having a strategic plan is very complicated! Everything moves so fast that you can't put a frame in place. So how do we do it?
By doing so, you will have a good framework to start with, without the need to create a gas factory full of equations!
Keep in mind that prioritizing is necessarily giving up (or, at least, putting off until later). Thus, a capacity plan is necessarily political, and requires a real strategy for aligning the various stakeholders!
At the end of this stage, you have in mind the guidelines that your capacity plan should follow.
In a second step, do a Inventory of available resources in your business. Think here in terms of both human and financial resources.
For your cross-cutting projects, ask each of the teams involved to declare their capacity over the coming period. You can suggest that they declare this capacity in the form of time/man, or in the form of a T-shirt sizing, if managers have difficulty accurately estimating the capacity of their teams.
At this stage, you must be careful to identify the run time and the build time - the run is always incompressible.
The key to succeeding in this stage? Think about the mesh of the team, not the individual. This will allow you to define a capacity across your organization, without tearing your hair out to go into micro detail.
Consider that here, by “team”, we mean a combination of homogeneous skills. In this sense, in the IT department, a team can be for example the IT Security team, the IT Data team, or the IT Integration team. In the marketing department, we will differentiate between the Content marketing team, the CRM marketing team, and the other members of the division, grouped together in a “Marketing Others” team.
The objective of this stage: to allow you toget as accurate an idea as possible of how skills are currently being used, and the time they have left to deploy on other projects.
For many clusters, it will undoubtedly be complex to tell you their run time and build time. But good news: we have a technique for you to help them!
Start by asking them to observe all the tasks the team does on a daily basis, and try to block them in half days of the week. Rather than dealing with everything instantly, it is a question for these teams to operate in a “batch” manner.
Each week, the teams try to improve on each of their batches. And, after four weeks, they can see how many half-days they need to put in to work on the daily run—and therefore, how much time they can free up for the build.
Demand management is based on a simple principle: create the conditions to express needs effectively, without wasting time on unnecessary processes. Too often, business teams flood IT with ill-structured requests, via emails, tickets, or informal discussions, resulting in lost time and widespread frustration. Structuring this management makes it possible to clarify priorities, avoid wasting energy and to focus efforts on projects that are really useful.
The first step is to organize the management of requests around structured duets.
Depending on the area, this may be:
This duo plays a key role as a filter and a single entry point for all requests within their scope.
It meets every two weeks to:
This mode of operation requires trades to take responsibility by only launching really relevant requests. IT is no longer becoming a simple performer but a real partner, capable of providing value by helping to structure needs from the start.
Once a request has been validated by the duo, it goes into a phase of Pre-sizing macro, which makes it possible to obtain a quick estimate of its impact.
This work is not done by a single person but by a Group of a few experts with a good vision of the capacities and functioning of teams.
Their mission is to:
The aim here is toTo go quickly. There is no question of launching an in-depth study at this stage. The idea is to give an initial assessment allowing professions to confront reality. A domain manager often has the tendency to think that everything is quick and easy. By giving him a macro estimate, he can better prioritize his requests according to the efforts required. This step also allowsDiscard quickly projects that make no sense or that are not feasible within a reasonable timeframe.
Once a request has been qualified and estimated, it must be integrated into the global roadmap. The objective is to avoid the “infinite pile” effect where projects are validated but never carried out due to lack of space in the schedule.
This stage is based on several principles:
This phase makes it possible to transform a simple request into a structured and feasible project, with a clear vision of its impact and deadline.
With this approach, demand management becomes smoother, more transparent, and more efficient. IT ceases to be a simple receptacle of requests and is becoming a strategic player in the selection and structuring of projects.
What's more, planning your project portfolio over a long period of time, such as a term, semester, or Program Increment, creates positive pressure throughout the organization. Each team will make sure to finish their project before the next meeting, and will make an effort to properly frame their specific needs for the coming period in advance. Only good!
Here, the aim is to compare the current capacity of the teams with the expected demand.
To do this, highlight bottlenecks and areas where resources are in surplus, to then balance them in view of the projects to be carried out.
Note that this step can also be done collectively, during your Quarter Plan or PI Planning. Based on the priorities of each stakeholder, you determine during this meeting what is and is not feasible at the level of the quarter.
This is the stage where you actually formalize your capacity plan.
To properly balance capacity and demand, you have several options. You can:
Often, creating a capacity plan blends both options. So, you design a tailor-made capacity plan, where you add resources here and remove skills there, to prioritize the projects that bring the most added value to the entire company.
Once your capacity plan is well balanced, Deploy the actions identified to reduce the gaps between capacity and demand. Depending on the strategies decided, this may require setting up a recruitment or training plan, finding the necessary external resources, updating the project portfolio roadmap, etc.
Do not hesitate to put in place tools to monitor the implementation of your capacity plan. Good news: we give you more information on the subject in the last part of this article.
A capacity plan is a document that is necessarily in flux, as demand and human or material resources change.
Therefore, set up KPIs to assess the effectiveness of your Capacity Planning, such as:
Then, by following these KPIs, continuously identify ways to optimize your capacity plan. Adjust it regularly based on changes in demand or resources, and by setting up checkpoints with the various stakeholders.
And perhaps most importantly: the Quarter Plan Day Is a moment of collective resynchronization on what is actually doable and not feasible for the next quarter. Too often, teams move forward with misaligned priorities, misunderstood constraints, and decisions made in silos. This internal event is precisely aimed at Break these silos by allowing employees to meet again, exchange freely and adjust their commitments together.
Beyond planning, this day offers a Precious time to meet, share realities in the field and solve operational problems that do not always find their place in the daily flow of video meetings or asynchronous discussions. It is also a time when we take awareness of real abilities teams, by comparing ambitions with available resources.
The physical format is key: it creates a strong human bond, facilitates candid discussions and anchors decisions in a collective dynamic. In the era of hybrid work and digital isolation, this type of event is becoming essential to recreate cohesion, giving meaning to priorities and ensure that the plan for the next quarter is based on a shared and realistic commitment.
Congratulations: you have implemented a well-oiled Capacity Planning process!
You read it above: your capacity plan needs to be reviewed regularly, in light of the variation in demand and available resources. This useful tool can then quickly become a headache, if you do not have a collaborative tool, where you can combine both the monitoring of your projects at the macro level and the fluctuation of available capacity.
At Airsaas, we have a bias: that of Prefer a capability that is approximately right rather than precisely false.
Hence the creation of our project portfolio management software, which allows you to create a capacity plan per team, over a fairly long period of time (quarter, semester, or PI). Your Capacity Planning then becomes easier to master, and focuses on building rather than on the capacity of each individual.
How does it work? Each team declares its capacity in Airsaas, and the CIO or PMO collects all the demand enterprise-wide. Subsequently, the Capability view of the tool allows you to know precisely which deliverables are hampering the progress of your projects, what capacity you have in each team, and what your additional human resources needs are.
Airsaas thus becomes your macro capacity tool - which does not prevent you from then, if you wish, from applying your Capacity Planning at the individual level over a maximum of two to three months.
In short: Airsas is the collaborative tool that helps you manage production capacity, by aligning all stakeholders with the company's strategic priorities.
Want to test the solution? Discover Airsaas' “capacity plan” feature, and ask for a demo from one of our experts!
