By: George Shaheen, Sales Consultant & Product Evangelist at Innotas
So you’ve done it. You’ve decided you’re going to implement some sort of resource management within your organization to get a handle on what everyone is working on, if your people are doing too much, too little (yeah right), and whether or not it’s relevant to your overarching business objectives.
That’s great! But what’s the first step? At Innotas, we believe that begins with building a strong foundation of what kind of capacity you actually have from a people perspective. In this first part of a three part series, we’ll discuss the foundation upon which you’ll build out your resource management process.
So first, how do we define true capacity? Here’s a simple equation to figure it out:
True Capacity = (Overall Hours Available) – (Holidays + Administrative Time) – (Out of Office)
Let’s work through each of those pieces.
Overall Hours Available
This is the sum of all hours available for a specified time period (a week, a month, a quarter, etc). Each person in your organization typically has a set number of hours they work per week (typically 40 for the US). But this includes part-time, contract, and other types of people in the business. In order to do this math, you’ll need to capture some key resource profile data:
- Resource Name (John Doe)
- Type of Resource (Employee, Contactor, etc)
- Business Unit (IT, Sales, etc):This is to determine capacity per business unit
- Department (within the Business Unit, are they in development? Are they in sales engineering?):This is to determine, within each business unit, how much time is available in each department.
- Resource Role (Project Manager, Business Analyst, etc):This is to determine capacity per role across departments or business units
- Capacity Hours Per Day/Week/Month (40 hours per week, for example)
- In addition to the above baseline, any other meta data you’d like to use for reporting and filtering purposes
Innotas comes standard with the above fields and provides the capability to add an unlimited number of additional fields for reporting purposes. We also provide detailed skill profiles, and many other fields for contact and location information.
Holidays + Administrative Time
Now that you’ve documented your people and a few of their attributes, we need to subtract some time for standard corporate holidays and regular administrative overhead. This can be a painful experience sometimes if there is no bulk way to do it. In Innotas, we provide corporate calendars (pictured above). With these you can:
- Create as many corporate calendars as you like (if your company is international, there will be different calendars based on different holidays)
- For each calendar, add exceptions for standard holidays and non-working days (some companies shut down for the last week of the year, for instance)
- Set working hours by day to take administrative overhead into account
- Apply these calendars in a bulk fashion to different groups of resources in your organization
Out of Office
In addition to corporate calendars, we have individual resource calendars. Why? Because people tend to go on vacation, get sick, or get called into jury duty to name a few. With resource calendars you can:
- Add resource level exceptions for vacation, PTO, sick days, jury duty, or any other resource-specific unavailability that subtracts from your true capacity
With all these pieces in place, you’ll have a strong foundation and a great idea for the true capacity of your organization.
