Resource Management and Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is the process of capturing demand against the project portfolio and calculating how many resources are required to then meet that demand.
- How much your team can get done within their physical working schedule. You can calculate how much work your team can realistically do within their capacity hours. See also how agile velocity metrics can help you visualize this!
- A transparent pool that takes into account your team’s capacity and skillset. Each team member’s availability and skillset is used to make sure their scheduled effectively
- Effective capacity planning gives team leaders a better look at their resources’ availability and schedules. Team leaders should be able to see what people are working on, and make quick decisions about how many tasks they can take on without burning them out.
Depending on the length of the project (and the pace of change), not all the resources will be identified long term. Therefore, it is good practice to define a Planning Horizon which can be used to allocate people using a logical approach. Planning Horizon is the amount of time an organization will look into the future when preparing a strategic plan:
- Named Resources 0-6 weeks
- Named and Generic Resources 6 weeks-3 months
- Mostly Generic Resources 3 months+
