Capacity Threshold

[Lila_Whitney]

Hello, Question for the resource managers out there. How have you calculated your team's "red zone"? Meaning this is enough and we can't take on anymore. We're an in-house agency and we've implemented forecasting for our business partners, so we try to look ahead and see what's coming so we can plan for freelance support or ask our AEs to bump out timelines/KOs. We use the Resource Planner, but I still find that when I go to one person who is at 30 out of 40 hours, he'll say he's completely overwhelmed. And then I can go to that same person later on when he's at 60 out of 40 and he's looking for things to do. How have you managed around this blocker? Thanks! Lila Whitney Discover Financial Services

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Lila, My initial thought was to invite you to consider our "https://store.atappstore.com/product/heatmap/" Heatmap solution, which offers you graphical, prioritized insight into which projects, roles, and users are covered, which ones are at risk, and which ones currently do not have adequate resourcing planned. However, your additional comments about the incongruity between how people are feeling about their availability vs what the data in Workfront shows (whether via Workfront or one of our solutions) suggests that there is a disconnect. I'd suggest you find its root cause first (the Usual Suspects including "we aren't really using Workfront to guide our real work", "the plans in Workfront aren't keeping up with the reality of the priorities", "we aren't marking our tasks as done in a timely fashion within Workfront", etc.). If you can resolve it, it might be that what you're already trying to make work for you within the Resource Planner will suffice. Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore

[AnthonyPernice]

My agency has not yet widely adopted resourcing, but one of my concerns is inputting good data for tasks we've never attempted to quantify. We have parameters and guidelines for "big lifts" like formatting a slide presentation (# of slides x 2 minutes per slide or 5 minutes per slide with speaker notes, for example), but we don't have those same sort of parameters for simpler tasks like a round of editorial corrections. In short, are you certain that the planned hours being inout for each task is generally accurate? If not, do you have the means to test- compare planned hours vs actuals? Anthony Pernice Healthcare Consultancy Group

[MirandaRa1]

We did this through adapting their overall FTE, or giving an extra 'dummy' job role with a % - that could be adjusted. You can also give a new schedule, but we judged that as more maintenance, so didn't use that for now... If you need to account for periodic times where you are busier than normal - you can also create a dummy project and assign tasks to them, so this time is then already removed from their AVL hours. Hope that gives some ideas... Miranda Rais GVC