Author: Mahendra Gupta

Mahendra Gupta is a PMP-certified professional with over 18 years of experience in smart workforce planning and resource management domain. He leads Saviom Software’s technical research and development wing. His expertise has helped multinational businesses around the globe diversify their project portfolio.

Why do businesses need digital dexterity now more than ever?

Written by Mahendra Gupta on August 25, 2021. Posted in Articles.

User adaptation is one of the major hurdles faced by the digital workplace today. As the work and the workplace continue to adopt and adapt new technologies available, employee usability lags. Sure, some organizations adapt faster than others, but for the long haul, digital dexterity helps organizations to acclimatize faster amid disruption and digital transformation.

According to Gartner, employees with a high level of digital dexterity are 3.3 times more likely to use digital initiatives to improve how they work. Coined by Gartner, digital dexterity is a terminology that goes beyond specific hard skills and technical abilities. To succeed and keep up with the world that’s going digital, inculcating digital dexterity should be a priority for every organization.

What is Digital Dexterity?

According to Gartner, “Digital dexterity is the ability and desire to exploit existing and emerging technologies for better business outcomes.” It is all about fostering a culture conducive to drive a successful digital transformation. Simply put, it is the willingness to engage, adapt, and learn to use new technology and include it in the way of work so that it fits the mission of the organization.

Advertisement
[widget id=”custom_html-68″]

CIO’s role in digital dexterity:

The onus is on the Chief Information Officer to create a digitally dexterous company. The CIO is responsible for supporting and encouraging desired behavior prerequisites to change management. However, transforming an entire organization from one that resists, or at the very least accepts new technology, can be very challenging. CIOs have an arduous road ahead, but not one that is impossible to conquer. Following these steps, CIO’s can mold digital dexterity into the workforce.

1) Begin with figuring out what failed to work in the past and how it can be corrected. Use surveys and focus groups to identify factors that trigger an aversion to change in employees.

2) Create a benchmark that evaluates employees’ outlook toward new technology at the workplace. This data will help you identify the areas that need a higher focus, like a particular department or a process.

3) Envision the future of your workplace and share it with your employees. Doing so will enhance the willingness of your workforce to accept new technology as a stepping stone to a digitally transformed future

4) Train users on the new technology extensively, and explain the benefits of increased collaboration, efficient data collection, and improve business efficiency. So that they are less resistant to adopt the change.

Prerequisites to digital dexterity:

1) Digital-First Mindset: The first and foremost step to create a digitally dexterous culture is seeking, exploring, and prioritizing digital solutions. In short, a digital mindset should be in place.

A digital mindset is an outlook that tends to reach out to technology to have a competitive advantage, and systematically approach enterprise data. When managers and employees instinctively resort to digital tools and data to improvise processes or create new products, they reap the benefits of agility and enhanced collaboration more often. To create a digital mindset, CIO’s must ensure these 3 steps:

i) To engage key stakeholders, communicating the benefits and importance of digital transformation is crucial.

ii) Practice what you preach. When executive management is engaged, employees are automatically engaged.

iii) Align rewards to digital transformation be it tangible or intangible will drive employee motivation and transformation goals.

2) Digitized Practices: The key practices that boost digital dexterity are digitizing operations, data-driven decisions, and encouraging collaborative ways of working and learning. Digital organizations display more advanced data capability levels than their peers. In a study, it came to light that less than 18% of organizations displayed digital dexterity. This also explains why 70% of digital transformations fall through the cracks. The following steps can ensure digitized practices at your workplace:

i) Start by hitting refresh on your current operational practices and restart practices by implementing digital solutions at the vanguard. This encourages collating and analyzing data systematically to drive better decision-making.

ii) Focusing on adoption instead of deployment of digitized practices leads to increased collaboration among actively engaged users, intelligent decision-making, and, over time, incessant behavioral change. Role model, rewards, gamification, etc, can have a significant impact on employee behaviors.

iii) Ensuring new work practices are set to default and accordingly, adapting the management, people, and processes to institutionalize the updated process. Doing this CIOs advocate transparency, core process standardization, and operations efficiency that digital technologies provide.

3) Empowered Talent: To create a culture conducive to digital dexterity, leveraging the digital IQ of the organization, developing key skills, and increasing engagement is important. In a McKinsey Global Institute survey, it was predicted that by 2030, nearly one-fourth workforce shall be retrained or replaced by AI and automation. Intel provided a Digital IQ training program for all employees to increase collaboration, communication, and innovation. In just a matter of two years, more than 20,000 employees completed the training. When this level of commitment to learning exists, it helps organizations retain their key talent and build an appreciation for digital initiatives.

4) Data Access & Collaboration Tools: Once talent, competence, and engagement are established, data access and collaboration tools can complement performance-related outcomes to drive innovation and share intelligence across the enterprise.

Data access is pivotal to digital transformation. Precise and timely data not only aids in improving business operations but also helps in proactively catering to customer demands. When employees realize the importance of data-driven outcomes, they continue to deploy data-driven approaches consistently.

Also, access to effective collaboration and coordination tools facilitates the key practices of employee engagement.

Advantages of digital dexterity:

1) More flexibility: Digitally dexterous employees are more willing to try new roles and don new hats to support the company’s adaptation to a digital workplace.

2) Higher autonomy: Employees are more willing to work on projects with initiatives and requirements that are susceptible to change or are unclear. They are also able to harness AI and other disruptive technologies at the right time.

3) Enhanced efficiency: As digital opportunities surface, employees can take advantage of and adapt themselves to improve their team or department’s efficiency.

4) Remote workability: The remote workforce is adept to work from anywhere as long as the right technologies are deployed. Collaborating with diverse perspectives and experience in remote work encourages digital dexterity.

5) Willing to take risks: Employees with high digital dexterity understand the positive impact of digitalization on the enterprise-wide level and are thus willing to take risks to pursue this result.

Takeaway: Creating a culture that fosters digital dexterity is a daunting task, especially for firms where employees are averse to trying new technologies. But with the right mindset, practices, talent, and tools, organizations can successfully establish digital dexterity. This is possible with a human-centric approach that will navigate the digital transformation. To facilitate this, businesses must ensure that their digital initiatives include training to existing and new employees on board. Also, CIO’s and senior management need to communicate long-term strategies and take accountability to ensure digital initiatives from start to finish.

7 Best Practices of Resource Forecasting to Optimize Project Costs

Written by Mahendra Gupta on August 4, 2021. Posted in Articles.

Resources play a crucial role in achieving successful project delivery. Whether human, equipment, facilities, or process, a project needs help to get the work done on time and within budget. Recent market fluctuations and economic uncertainties fueled by the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic have wreaked havoc on business sustainability.

As human resources are expensive, project managers cannot afford to rely on guesstimates to meet the deliverables within a dynamic business environment.

According to Deloitte’s Global Cost Survey 2020, “74% of organizations preferred cost reduction over other business initiatives in the post-pandemic era.”

So, to stay profitable amid the current volatilities, accurate estimation is a prerequisite. It is when resource forecasting comes into the picture.

Before delving deep, let’s get the basics right.

What is resource forecasting, and what is its significance in project management?

As the name suggests, forecasting defines the probability of future events and helps project managers implement corrective measures in advance. Resource forecasting is the process of predicting resource metrics used in projects such as demand, supply, cost, vacancy, etc., in advance. It usually occurs in the project initiation phase or can happen as early as the sales process stage.

Resource forecasting is a critical function of the project resource planning process. It ensures that projects are suitably staffed and equipped to address any sudden changes during the entire lifecycle. Using resource forecasting techniques, managers can predict future workload, skill requirements, project financials, resource utilization and apply corrective measures accordingly.

In the absence of appropriate forecasting tools, projects might get delayed or result in budget overruns. It has a cumulative impact on the deliverables and leads to project failure and low client satisfaction. Therefore, businesses must invest in a robust resource forecasting solution to stay profitable and ahead of the curve.

Advertisement
[widget id=”custom_html-68″]

Best practices of resource forecasting and how it helps optimize project costs

Cost management is one of the crucial responsibilities of a project manager. Let’s understand how resource forecasting contributes to cost optimization:

1.Maximize profitable utilization and reduce resource cost

Keeping your team members busy doesn’t necessarily translate to productivity. They could be either occupied on non-billable or mundane BAU activities. So how can you ensure the productivity of your project team for a high ROI? Billable utilization is an essential KPI of project management that directly contributes to revenue generation and project effectiveness.

Using resource forecasting solutions, project managers can gain insight into billable, non-billable or strategic work ahead of the curve. Accordingly, managers can mobilize resources from non-billable to billable/strategic work and improve project profitability. Forecasting analytics helps avoid over or underutilization and facilitates optimum utilization of resources against their capacity.

2.Minimize last-minute hiring/firing costs

Often, projects are unable to kick off at the right time due to insufficient resources. As pointed by PwC Project Management insights, “lack of resources contributes to 30% of project failures.” Resource forecasting helps predict the resource demand for future and pipeline projects. Using capacity planning, managers can identify the excesses or shortfalls ahead of time and apply appropriate resourcing treatments to bridge the gap. If the requirement is more than capacity, there is a shortage of resources, which means you cannot start the project. On the contrary, if the demand is less than resource supply, there is an excess, which hits your bottom line.

In either case, time and budget overruns are inevitable. Corrective measures such as training programs, adjusting project timelines, hiring permanent or contingent resources, or selling excess capacity helps. These proactive measures eliminate unnecessary hiring and firing costs and help create a future-ready skilled workforce. Thus, resource forecasting facilitates informed hiring decisions and allows sufficient lead time to reduce unwanted cost escalations.

3.Eliminate employee burnout and deliver within time and budget

Often, managers constantly overload few high-performing resources with work as they have proved to deliver efficiently in the past. This practice can result in employee burnout, increased absenteeism, compromised quality, or worse, unplanned attrition. Consequently, the project profitability is at stake, and cost escalations become unavoidable. Using a modern resource forecasting solution, managers can gain foresight into workforce utilization and take preventive measures to avoid overallocation in the first place.

Forecasting analytics enables managers to consider resource availability and capacity before assigning them to projects. It ensures that employees are not overburdened. Furthermore, resource forecasting helps managers to avoid under/over skilled resources to projects. Underqualified resources delay projects and cause subsequent budget overruns. Overqualified resources may feel disengaged, unproductive, and overshoot the project costs. Enterprise-wide visibility helps allocate the right resources to projects at the right time and cost.

4. Reduce bench-related costs and manage your bottom line

A study by HBR points that bad hiring decisions can lead to 80% of employee turnover. It can cause a large bench of mismatched skillsets that adversely impacts the bottom line. Resource forecasting solutions have inbuilt people on the bench reports that show which resources will end up on the bench after a specific date. Using this report, managers can minimize bench-time and improve project profitability by proactively looking for appropriate tasks for resources before getting rolled off.

Furthermore, project vacancy reports provide visibility of resource demand across the enterprise. Using these reports, project managers can deploy appropriate benched resources to tasks. Resource forecasting also improves the billability of benched resources by providing training or shadowing opportunities. Project managers can address other resource shortfalls by making informed hiring decisions.

5.Improve employee productivity with competent resource allocation

When managers consider employees’ skills and interests before assigning them to tasks, it enhances their engagement and productivity. It helps managers deliver projects within the stipulated budget and timeline. As already mentioned, resource forecasting predicts the resource requirements for future projects in advance. Using these analytics, managers can start planning for fulfillment.

Studies have shown that empowering employees to select projects of interest increases task ownership and motivation. Accordingly, managers can publish the resource requirements within an enterprise on an appropriate resource management tool. Relevant resources are notified and can show their interest in joining the project. Managers can allocate suitable candidates from the potential applicants to ensure higher engagement, productivity, and eventually project profitability.

6.Track and improve project financials ahead of the curve

Cost management is one of the essential functions of project management. Besides estimating, allocating, and controlling the project budget, cost management also helps businesses predict future expenses to minimize budget overrun. Using resource forecasting solutions, project managers can monitor critical financial indicators such as costs, revenue, profit margins, and overheads.

Tracking and comparing the actual spending against the estimated budget helps control budget overruns. If there is a variance, necessary corrective measures can mitigate project risks ahead of time. Comparing the forecasted vs. actual spending helps improve future estimations and align them to reality. Forecasting analytics allows monitoring of shared resources working on multiple activities. Accordingly, managers can adjust the resource mix and control project costs in advance.

7. Timely availability of resources helps avoid cost escalations

Bottlenecks are a nightmare for project managers, especially when they happen close to the deadline leaving no scope to prevent delays or cost overruns. One of the causes of bottleneck could be when a critical resource’s unavailability in completing one task delays other dependent tasks. Subsequently, the project fails to deliver on time and within budget.

Resource forecasting can help make the right resource available for the right project at the right time. Project managers can use resource optimization techniques to avoid resource bottlenecks. They can apply resource leveling, i.e., extending project timeline to accommodate available resources or resource smoothing, wherein additional resources help in timely delivery.

The Takeaway

To sum up, resource forecasting is a crucial element in project planning. Ideally, managers must control project costs from the beginning and not leave them to the end. Cost management primarily helps eliminate unnecessary project costs without compromising the quality of the deliverables. It is a continuous endeavor that requires constant monitoring to stay within the budget. Resource forecasting identifies discrepancies and helps you to take timely actions and avoid budget overruns. Some project managers reserve a small fraction of the budget as a buffer for unforeseen circumstances. They formulate the project plan with the remaining funds to avoid last-minute hiccups.

Improving Project Performance through Capacity Planning

Written by Mahendra Gupta on May 12, 2021. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Improving Project Performance through Capacity Planning

What defines a project’s success?

An ideal scenario would be when the project deliverables meet the client’s expectations and are completed within time and budget. However, it is not as easy as it sounds. Project managers need to meticulously plan every nitty-gritty and track the performance at every level to come out successful.

As Thomas Edison once quoted- ‘Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.’

The same holds good in the project management landscape as well. Starting a new project (the opportunity) is only half the battle won. It only succeeds when there is a detailed project plan with deliverables documented against each milestone. The project manager then needs to track them at every stage and take corrective action if something goes wrong

The project’s requirement spans from niche competencies to equipment, material, asset, and so on. It is crucial to assign the right human resource to the right project. After all, your workforce’s capabilities and skills do justice to each task and enable you to lead it through success.

Capacity Planning helps one predict the shortfall or excess of resources in advance. It allows the project managers to be better prepared for future projects and avoids any last-minute hiccups. With proper resource planning, the project can be successfully delivered.

Let us now take a deep dive into the concepts of capacity planning and its role in enhancing project performance.

What is Capacity Planning, and why is it important?

The comprehensive process of forecasting the capacity and demand gap and implementing the right resourcing treatments to bridge the gap is known as resource capacity planning.

It empowers data-driven decision-making by centralizing and gathering relevant information on resource availability and utilization in real-time. This creates transparency and facilitates managers to stay informed of enterprise-wide resource metrics at all times. Moreover, accurate prediction of the metrics allows them to form a full-proof action plan in time. All these benefits put together make resource capacity planning an incumbent process in the project and resource management realm.

Here is a detailed description:

What is the significance of capacity planning in project management?

Supposedly, there is a new project in the pipeline, but you fail to estimate the delivery’s resource requirement due to the sales stage’s lack of visibility. When the project begins, you realize you don’t have an adequate workforce on board, and it stalls your progress. In worse cases, it will bring the project to a halt.

Capacity planning resolves the very same issue for you. It aligns the sales and delivery process by forecasting the resource capacity and identifying the skills gap. Once the project reaches a certain probability stage of closure, the project manager can estimate the requirement and initiate the resource requisition process.

The resource manager gets enough leeway to gauge the deviation in the demand and capacity and align them in due time. Diligent planning eliminates last-minute hiring/firing costs helping you control the budget and the timeline.

Moreover, capacity planning facilitates effective bench management by providing enough lead time to train the benched resources or sell the excess capacity. Overall, capacity planning is a robust technique for building an optimized workforce and reducing project management costs in the present volatile market.

Below is the list of ways capacity planning can escalate a project’s performance,

5 Ways how capacity planning improves project performance

1. Reduces project resource costs

As already mentioned, capacity planning provides enterprise-wide visibility of the resource demand, their capacity, attributes like role, skills, costs, location, etc. Being forewarned about the project demand, managers get enough lead-time to procure the right resource at the right time and cost.

With a unified view of the workforce, they can also leverage the cost-effective global resource across matrix boundaries to maintain any project’s financial health. Simultaneously, upskilling the benched resources and planned hiring minimizes last-minute hiring cycles curbing the costs substantially. All these measures cumulatively reduce project resource costs significantly.

Advertisement
[widget id=”custom_html-68″]

2. Bridges the skill gap in advance

When a project is in the pipeline, managers get an overview of the future requirement in advance. Leveraging this information, they can evaluate the existing resource pool, competencies, schedules, and availability. It will allow them to understand if there is a shortage or excess of resources. If the resources are in excess (capacity exceeds the demand), managers can bring forward additional pipeline projects, sell the excess capacity, and so on.

In case there is a resource crunch, managers can hire permanent talent, contingent workers, or contractors to bridge the gap. Or they can go ahead and train the existing resources. When an appropriate measure is implemented, managers can plug the skills gap in advance and ascertain timely delivery of projects keeping the client’s expectation in mind.

3. Ensures competent resource allocation at all times

With transparency in project tasks, their skills demand, resources’ schedules, and their profiles, managers can allocate the competent resources to the respective tasks. Using the capacity planning solution, they can take a ‘best resource, best fit’ approach instead of a ‘first visible, first fit’ approach.

After procuring the workforce to execute the project, the next step is to understand the resource schedules and their availability. If a resource is booked for another project, managers need to ensure that their allocation does not lead to overutilization. Otherwise, resources may experience burnout. At the same time, the expertise level of every employee must be considered. For instance, a low-experienced resource may take more time to accomplish a task than a highly experienced resource. Based on their proficiency, managers have to design the schedules. Capacity planning makes this process a breeze by providing an overview of resource allocation, utilization, and schedules on one single platform.

4. Streamline Pipeline and Delivery process

Given the ability to forecast future opportunities and their requirements, capacity planning brings together the pipeline and delivery process. Pipeline projects can either come from the sales team or they can be internal projects to meet the company’s strategic objectives. For instance, you have a marketing project to work on two months down the line. You require three content writers, two graphic designers, two web developers, and so on. Before bidding for the project, the sales team discusses the project viability with the delivery team.

The delivery team’s responsibility is to ensure that they have enough capacity and capability to take up this new project. It can only be guaranteed with the help of a robust resource capacity planning process to establish a go or no-go decision. It also facilitates a logical and informed decision between two organizations without any ambiguity.

Proactive planning allows the sales team to take on more projects as the delivery team formulates a working framework for the approval process. Thus, capacity planning also plays a critical role in enhancing the revenue generation activities for the firm.

5. Predicts and enhances employee productivity

One of the most important factors to consider while managing projects is the resource health index. If your resources are experiencing burnout, or if a highly-skilled resource is working on admin or mundane tasks, or an instance of mismatched skillset, it can all boil down to lowered productivity.

Capacity planning helps managers combat this challenge. It can provide actionable insights into resource utilization and availability. If a resource is working on a non-billable project or admin work, managers can mobilize them to either strategic or billable work. It allows efficient utilization of their expertise, enhancing their productivity. Similarly, if a resource is over-utilized, managers can deploy the right optimization technique (resource leveling or smoothing) to even out the workload.

Takeaway tips

After understanding the impact of capacity planning on a project’s performance, here are some final takeaway tips to help you streamline the process:

Equip an advanced capacity planning and forecasting process to enhance efficiency.
Stay forewarned of resource requirements of pipeline projects to fill the demand gap in advance.
Assess the capacity vs. demand gap report diligently before implementing the resourcing treatment.
Organize internal or external training sessions periodically for the benched employees to future-proof them.
Leverage the matrix organizational structure to form a cross-functional team and reduce the hiring/firing cycle.

What measures do you take to optimize your workforce?

How can you enhance your workforce capacity planning

Written by Mahendra Gupta on August 18, 2020. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on How can you enhance your workforce capacity planning

Reports suggest that employee costs can comprise up to 70% of operating expenses in a highly skilled workforce.

Thus, optimal utilization of your resources is critical for delivering successful projects. However, is just a ‘gut-feel’ approach or conventional offline practices are suitable to manage your workforce efficiently?

Definitely not! Because these offline practices lack accuracy and cannot forecast valuable insights, which can result in the wrongful hiring/firing cycle, thereby incurring extra costs to the company. This is the reason why leading companies find it imperative to take a data-driven approach to plan for the needs of the organization proactively. It will minimize the extra costs of misaligned talent deployment.

An advanced capacity planning solution is designed to provide leaders with foresight into the workforce capacity. It provides enterprise-wide visibility into the available skills that lets them decrease the bench strength. Using these insights, leaders can tap into the right potential and allocate the right resources to the right job.

Moreover, this unmatched visibility into critical skill gaps and foresight into capacity and demand for future projects helps leaders to enhance productivity and deliver the best results. Although capacity planning can facilitate you to scale up your resource management game, one question persists,

How to leverage the tool to the best of its benefits and enhance capacity planning?

Here is the answer, followed by some useful tips:

1. Begin with assigning the key resources

The first step towards enhancing capacity planning is using critical resources with a highly specialized skillset for the high priority projects. The reason is that their talent and expertise can impact billable and strategic work in the future. This allocation will help you hit the ground running, and you can start booking more resources as needed.

By setting up a systematic and organized resource profile, you can be in the know of your resource’s abilities and competencies, and if they have taken training in any particular course. Now, how can you use these skills at your advantage? Recognize opportunities that align with your resource’s capabilities and assign them these tasks. You are not only helping your business grow but also enabling your employees to grow professionally and enhance performance. It’s a win-win for both.

2. Strategize with what-if scenarios

As a manager, you don’t want to be caught off-guard with unforeseen scenarios. A robust capacity planning tool caters to this as well. At the nascent planning stages of a project, you can modify the situations and predict the likely outcomes with accuracy. While doing so, you can plan with what suits best to your project and is profitable for the future.
What-if analysis is quite simply, a plan before the plan. The data-driven actionable insights will let you make strategic decisions and empower performance levels down the line. Moreover, you will be spared from unnecessary budget overruns, project bottlenecks when you have unmatched visibility of all the situations well in advance. It will also help you optimize resource utilization and work assignments for future projects.

3. Predict capacity v/s demand

One of the major benefits you can avail from a capacity planning solution is its ability to generate accurate forecast reports. These reports will forewarn you of the future project resource demand and the actual capacity. By leveraging these reports, you can bridge the capacity vs. demand gap (that can result in project bottlenecks) using appropriate resourcing treatment.

What’s more? These predictions will also give you a comprehensive view of excess and shortage of resources (resources gap) you might face down the line. To cater to this, you can implement adequate remedial measures and ensure uniform utilization of resources. Here is a list of potential solutions you can use:

Advertisement
[widget id=”custom_html-68″]

When there is a shortage of resources:

Adjust project timelines to align with available capacity.
Retrain and skill up available employees to fill the gaps.
Hire contingent workforce before time to avoid further roadblocks.
Optimize Bench Management to minimize bench time.

When resources are in excess:

Bring forward project timelines to allocate tasks to the idle resources.
Fast-track projects by marketing the capacity available.
Bring forward initiatives to meet strategic goals and allow resources to brainstorm and contribute.
Allow movement of resources across departments to maximize utilization and reduce bench time.

4. Track the planned v/s actual hours

Allocating resources is not the end of capacity planning. One major responsibility a manager has is to keep the project costs under control, maximize billability, and reduce resourcing costs. In order to do so, managers must keep a check on the project’s progress, resources’ progress, and the number of hours they log to a task. Why is this information so vital?
The reason behind its significance is, when you have a report of the actual hours utilized by resources, you can compare the same with the planned hours for each task. If your resources exceed the planned hours, you can brainstorm and identify the potential reasons behind it and take corrective measures ahead of the curve. This will keep the project costs in check and keep your firm from incurring any unnecessary costs.

5. Plan, represent and assign

Different types of projects demand different courses of planning. A mature resource manager goes for a hybrid approach to plan these projects. To streamline your staffing, you can follow a 3-step approach of planning, representing, and assigning resources. Here is the detailed explanation of each step:

Plan – the most important step to a successful project is a well-channelized plan. You can opt for the best approach that suits your project. For example, you can use work breakdown structures to detail the stages and allocate resources. In other cases when you are not sure of the resources who will work on the tasks, you will require high-level planning and approvals from senior managers to proceed further.
Represent – A capacity planning solution is flexible enough to let you represent the resource demand in different units. You can directly represent the demand in headcounts, or FTE (Full-time equivalent- standard working hours of a firm per week), or a number of hours at your convenience. For instance, if you require 4 FTE, that means you need four employees to work for 4 weeks or 4 employees to work for a week and complete the task.
Assign – After creating a meticulous plan and listing the resource demand, the last step is to use the advanced filters of the tool, enter your requirements based on role, department, competencies, location, availability, and a number of hours/FTE/headcount and assign the right resources to the right task.

The takeaway

A powerful, advanced, and comprehensive capacity planning tool is pivotal to utilize the talent pool to their best extent. When a resource manager has 360-degree visibility of the resources and their skills, has a provision to toggle and compare scenarios before planning for a project, he/she can build the highest value project and eliminate potential pitfalls.

The above-mentioned tips to scale up your capacity planning process will enable you to empower your decision making, enhance productivity, and help your resources add a more valuable contribution to the firm. Now that the potential benefits of a structured process are clear, have you thought of revitalizing your planning process?