In a world where resources are becoming increasingly scarce and deadline pressures continue to increase, capacity planning is more critical than ever. And every delay or misunderstanding in this planning can put your entire portfolio at risk.
In our previous article, we showed you our method for setting up effective Capacity Planning. Go here if that's what you're looking for.
But if you want to go further, here are eight pragmatic capacity planning tips to move your projects forward faster and better. An accelerated business transformation is yours, and well aligned with your strategic goals!
Let's start by concretely defining what capacity planning is, and why this method helps you optimize your project portfolio.
We call “capacity planning”, “Capacity Planning” or even “capacity plan” a method designed to assess, plan, and manage the resources needed to meet needs of an organization.
It is a planning process to create a production plan that aligns the company's demand for projects with its actual resources.
Capacity planning involves organizing several types of resources over time:
It is often this last point that is the source of bottlenecks in the progress of projects - hence the benefits of careful capacity planning.
Capacity planning is used by businesses in all industries. And for good reason: it has many benefits!
Thanks to a well-designed Capacity Planning, you can:
In short, a capacity plan gives you all the keys to launch projects... and succeed! Everyone is aligned around strategic priorities, without resources being over- or under-utilized. Enough to improve relationships between the various professions, and accelerate the transformation of your organization.
Want to delve deeper into the definition of this strategic planning method? Go to our article “Capacity Planning: definition and basic principles”.
Aligning your production capacity and the strategic demands of your organization requires methodology and vision. Here are the eight keys to success in planning your business capacity well into the future.
The strategic vision of your business is the prerequisite for truly effective capacity planning. Because, after all, the idea of Capacity Planning is to ensure that the use of resources transcribes the strategic goals of the company.
Your objective is therefore for your planning to translate into operational actions the strategy of the entire organization.
To do that, start with Focus on the projects that have the most value on the roadmap of the coming period, and prioritize them in terms of resource allocation.
To be sure that your Capacity Planning reflects all the strategic challenges of the organization, you must ensure that all your stakeholders are in line in terms of priorities.
Because don't forget: prioritizing is necessarily giving up - or, at least, putting off projects over time. Hence the interest of go through a collective moment where management and business lines can discuss these priorities.
This is where methodologies like those of the Quarter Plan Or of PI Planning make perfect sense. The idea here: to set up collective planning moments to align everyone, during which each team is committed to the time they can allocate to each project.
These meetings also make it possible to identify the risks and dependencies of each project in advance, as well as potential bottlenecks. They also save you the long hours spent between different departments, in one-to-one meetings, collecting everyone's needs and expectations.
Whichever method you choose, remember that your ability to plan and deploy a workload plan can't rely solely on your teams. Play together: you will see the difference!
Often, businesses are observed to put a capacity plan in place on a very short timescale - usually a week. However, this short timeframe makes it very tedious to update Capacity Planning... which, in any case, is bound to evolve as demand and resources change!
Our bias at Airsaas? Choose a capacity that is approximately right rather than precisely false.
To do this, you need to move your capacity planning to a different, longer time frame. Setting up a capacity during the quarter - or during the semester, or at the PI - makes more sense compared to the reality of the work that teams must provide.
The added benefit? This long-term planning creates positive pressure on the teams, who make sure to finish their projects before the end of the period, and to properly align their needs in advance of the following period.
Of course, that doesn't stop development teams, who are used to shorter sprints, from continuing to plan their tasks over shorter periods of time. But your schedule, on the other hand, foresees the deliverables over the medium term.
Traditionally, capacity planning is done by the job. And this is one of the elements that can quickly turn this schedule into a real headache!
Instead, we advise you to adopt a more pragmatic approach, which consists in estimate the time needed for the deliverable rather than for the task. This way, you avoid going into micro details, and getting lost in them.
Again, nothing prevents you from creating schedules on a task basis based on the allocation of resources decided on each deliverable.
When setting up your capacity plan, it is essential to Project yourself on the time available for your projects (that is to say the build).
However, you may have tested it: creating capacity at the level of individuals can quickly become a headache if you have to do it for an entire organization!
So, rather than doing your capacity planning at the individual level, we recommend doing it at the team level. By doing so, you make your capacity more flexible, and increase your chances of matching capacity and demand.
Note that each team does not necessarily need to be a separate division of the company. Instead, you should consider each of your teams as a “collection of homogeneous skills”.
For example, for the IT division, it may be the IT Security team, the IT Data team, and the IT Integration team. Another example: for the marketing department, segment it into a CRM marketing team, Content marketing, plus another team bringing together the rest of the marketers.
To establish a Capacity Planning that is as realistic as possible, use scenarios that bridge the gap between current capacity and expected demand.
For example, you might ask yourself the following questions:
For each scenario, estimate the budget to be deployed, as well as the ROI to be derived from it in view of the value expected strategically by your organization. The result: you get the projection that is most beneficial for the teams and for the company.
Make no mistake: regardless of the alignment measures between teams that you have put in place, as time goes by, the demand in your business and its resources will fluctuate. Therefore, you will need to review your capacity planning on a regular basis. Enough to quickly pull your hair out... if you don't have the right tool!
To simplify the lives of CIOs, PMOs and project managers, we designed Airsaas: a project portfolio management software, which allows you to design a capacity per team over the long term. Ideal for focusing on building.
The tool is fundamentally collaborative. Each team declares how much bandwidth they have on the tool, so you can know exactly where to allocate your resources according to your strategic vision.
Thanks to the Capacity view, you can visualize the capacity of each team, what deliverables are preventing you from moving forward, or what additional human resources you may need.
Thanks to this macro capability, no more hours wasted updating a Capacity Planning to the task and the person... which ends up in the trash two days later.
Interested in the solution? Discover Airsaas' capacity planning functionality now.
You know it better than anyone: a project rarely goes as planned. The company is a living medium, where internal skills are changing and where the priority of requests can change according to market trends and the results of the organization.
Hence the need to provide margins to deal with the unexpected.
So adopt an iterative and adjustable approach to your capacity planning. In particular, you can do this through a longer-term approach, in the form of a Quarter Plan or PI Planning, which allows you to review capacity planning at fixed deadlines, working collaboratively.
Last but not least: setting up the right KPIs to monitor the effectiveness of Capacity Planning.
In particular, you can include in your dashboards:
Also, consider organizing periodic monthly reviews to assess effectiveness and refine your schedule.
You are now ready to (finally) set up a Capacity Planning that balances demand and available resources!
Do you need a tool to simplify your task? Request an Airsaas demo, and see how its Capacity Planning feature can help you better align your projects with your strategic vision.
