Resource Capacity Planning

Services departments face unpredictable workloads, where new projects and tasks can arrive unexpectedly. Without visibility of the skills capacity to take on this work, Managers can easily over commit and fail to deliver on time. Resource management software supports resource capacity planning.

Resource capacity planning shows the skill capacity to take on new work and, by layering proposed tasks on top of committed work, highlight skills bottlenecks and any spare capacity.

Within Innate resource management software, everyone gets this visibility; they can easily see the bottlenecks, spare capacity and identify feasible start dates. Each person’s commitments are taken into account, including both project and operational tasks, such as support and maintenance etc.

As new tasks are entered, either in the browser or from Microsoft Project, the skills capacity is immediately visible. All can see the spare capacity and bottlenecks and drill down to look at each person’s current commitments.

Adding New Work Requests

Innate's resource management software provides web based spreadsheets for resource planning at a number of levels:

• Resource planning for both major and minor projects, initially at a generic skill level
• More simple, operational type tasks such as support, maintenance work etc, to build a complete picture of resource demand
• Optionally, projects can be scheduled in Microsoft Project and kept in sync with the Innate database

The spreadsheet style interface enables profiles of work to be easily entered and adjusted.

The spreadsheet view shows the work profile in units for the Innate project and the total rows underneath highlight any resource bottleneck, e.g. Analysts are in short supply for January.

Resource Capacity Planning and Scenario Analysis

Changing priorities or the arrival of new work can unbalance the workload, introducing new resource bottlenecks and the risk of delay. Innate resource management software gives you scenario analysis capabilities so that alternative ways forward can be easily assessed and communicated.

Each scenario is a complete copy of the live data, so changes do not impact the live data until the scenario is accepted.

• Those projects that may be moved can be highlighted, e.g. low priority projects that need to give back resource for higher priority work
• The Gantt chart view enables you to move chunks of work in time and to immediately see the effect on resource bottlenecks

There is no automatic rescheduling of projects and tasks - rather we help you create scenarios that you know are practical and then show you the impact, for better resource capacity planning.

Service organizations need good capacity planning to ensure consistent delivery of commitments and to retain client satisfaction. Innate resource management software provides simple, effective resource capacity planning.