{"id":15297,"date":"2020-11-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-16T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/resource-capacity-planning-its-not-in-the-details\/"},"modified":"2022-03-29T15:20:26","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T20:20:26","slug":"resource-capacity-planning-its-not-in-the-details","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/resource-capacity-planning-its-not-in-the-details\/","title":{"rendered":"Resource Capacity Planning – It’s Not in the Details"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Resource<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

There is a myth in planning circles that more detail is better and more accurate. In resource planning this looks like huge spreadsheets with people\u2019s names assigned to specific projects across the months or weeks for at least a year. If we can plan out that much detail that far, it must be accurate, right? Well, not so fast. There are three main problems with this approach:<\/p>\n

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  1. It takes a long time to create and modify those spreadsheets.<\/strong>
    \nIf you want to see what happens if you complete projects A, B, and D instead of C, E, and F you\u2019ll probably end up burning the midnight oil to get there. And better hope you don\u2019t mess up any formulas in that spreadsheet while you\u2019re at it. And if there is more than one person accessing that spreadsheet, try not to step on each other\u2019s toes (or rows). If you are managing resources for a large group, this quickly becomes unwieldy and leads to the dreaded paralysis by analysis syndrome.<\/li>\n
  2. These large spreadsheets make it very difficult to see the forest for the trees.<\/strong>
    \nSure, there are summary tabs in the spreadsheet, but you can\u2019t play with those summaries. You have to go back to the detail they are rolled up from to see how the forest might change if you modify some of those trees. Let\u2019s say the \u201cforest\u201d view shows you departmental summaries across projects. That\u2019s still going to leave you with quite a few rows in the summary tab to get to the bottom-line that shows if that department or group is over-capacity. And if they are, it\u2019s back to the detail sheets to figure out how to change it.<\/li>\n
  3. You\u2019re trying to solve the wrong problem!<\/strong>
    \nThe \u201cforest\u201d level is primarily concerned with approving the right projects that fit the available capacity. This is not a user-by-user problem, it is a larger-scale, capacity problem. If you have a 500 person IT department, for instance, you really want to see some breakout of those 500 people into logical groupings and then select the projects that fit those groupings.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The guest speaker for our upcoming Agile Enterprise customer webcast on November 10th, Dr. Klaus Leopold, released a book in 2018 called \u201cRethinking Agile: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing To Do With Business Agility<\/em><\/a>\u201d that has a great take on this, in a slightly different context. He described and laid out various types of planning and execution into three \u201cFlight Levels.\u201d These Flight Levels can apply to resource planning as well. I\u2019ll let you read the book to get the full understanding, but here\u2019s how I apply them to Resource Planning.<\/p>\n

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