Workfront

Vazgen_Babayan · 5/14/21

Hello everyone,

Wanted to raise a question on capacity and how to measure it. We are researching different layers of capacity and landed at the following three - individual person capacity, role/skillset capacity and team capacity.

And while measurement may sound simple at a glance, we noticed that measuring it for specific periods can cause challenges concerning different workflows. For example, individual person capacity for a quarter or team capacity for a day.

How do you approach that in your organizations? Which of those capacity types do you measure? What metric do you use?

ChrisBudgen · 5/26/21

Hi @Vazgen Babayan‚ ,

in our case we calculate the capacity (norm-time) for a certain period based on the users schedule. The next level are the available hours which take the capacity minus all planned absences (PTO, Public Holidays).

Norm-Times and Available Days are not only important for planning but also as a basis for the timesheets. Since we have to timesheet our norm-time.

The special case for us are split weeks (e.g. Mon 31.5. is one week and Tue 1.6 until Sun 6.6 is a different week)

Cheers,

Chris

Vazgen_Babayan · 5/26/21

Thanks @Chris Budgen‚!

It's interesting, how you distinguish between the two. How do you balance them? Do you only use norm hours for longer-term planning and available days for short-term? Or one is for reporting and one is for planning?

ChrisBudgen · 5/26/21

Norm-Time is what we use for mid- to long-term planning, the available days are relevant for short-term planning and reporting (especially for the billability)

Vazgen_Babayan · 5/26/21

Got it, thanks Chris!

I also noticed you have filled the survey in the other thread. If you've got time, I would love to explore these concepts further with you. Here's my Calendly link in case you're interested: Link

AnthonyIm · 5/27/21

At my former agency, capacity in Workfront was a combination of Schedule (to capture office closures and Time Off) and FTE.

Use case: My Group Creative Director is technically free Mon-Fri 9-5 for 40 hours a week. However, they have meetings, trainings, mentoring, etc. so is really only available 50% of the time for client work. So my resource manager would love to see their available hours in Resource Planner as 20 hours a week.

(And also, as you already know, we used "fake people" as placeholders for unassigned work so we could utilize those fabulous bar charts and see if there was too much work for the team.)

When I left, we were using the global Resource Management setting of Default Schedule and FTE, which mostly works because 90% of our active users are in the US. But it does cause some issues now with our Europe offices because the available hours are based on US Office Closures.

Now... we never gave people more than one job role (even if they did the duties of another job role) because our financial system billed whatever their primary role was. So I know this doesn't take into account the WF functionality of giving someone multiple roles and a percentage of time with each role.

But I hope this was helpful.

Vazgen_Babayan · 5/28/21

Thanks Anthony! And that's capacity for an individual, something we worked quite a lot on in the past 🙂 Longer-term though, it will start to break when we think of multiple teams and yearly planning activities, no?

In fact, I have compiled a survey on that topic here: Link

Would be interested to have your input on the questions there.