Hi: I’m an Eric. I’ll answer the questions below… 1) Do we use the WorkFront Capacity Planner? --> Not in regular weekly use. We struggle to get the project plan quality high enough to use the Capacity Planner meaningfully. We’ve used it in the past, wondered about the results, and drilled down and found the project quality wasn’t good enough - mostly with regard to overdue tasks. We are on the verge of trusting what it tells us, however. I’m optimistic; 2) Resource Pools - We have one resource pool that has everyone in it. We tried multiple resource pools once long ago, but since people from one pool can work on projects with people in the other pool, the distinction between people in one pool and people in the other pool was essentially meaningless, we went to one pool. I would create multiple pools if the people in one pool will never work on projects with people from another pool. I hear that WorkFront is going to allow multiple resource pools on a project someday. That will make it more sensible to divide people into multiple pools. 3) Multiple Lines of Business - We do have multiple lines of business, and a portfolio aligned to each. We do not look at capacity by portfolio, however. We look at capacity enterprise-wide. If the cap planner says we need 50 artists in August of this year, then we drill down to see why - and we find data quality issues in projects in addition to knowing what demand is driving that staffing level. If you have multiple lines of business, and the project teams never cross over lines of business - in other words, LOB A is always serviced by Team A - then you could create a resource pool for Team A. That would actually simplify the capacity planning process by reducing the demand and reducing the number of roles you have to look at. You’ll have to set up the capacity planner and select projects anew each time you switch from looking at Resource Pool A to Resource Pool B. There are no Capacity Planning Profiles in WorkFront. That would make it easy to switch from one pool to another. Oh well, we’ll look to the future for that. We get a lot of value from the User Utilization functionality, however. We back into Capacity planning using it - if our existing staffing level is overloaded, and you’ll see that in red on the user utilization screen, one way to resolve that long term overallocation is to staff up. The data quality issue still matters, but you can see the overdue work readily (in pink) and can start fixing the specific problems that impact the specific resources you’re looking at. We have a few roles that are pivotal in what we do - we aren’t concerned about the capacity of every role. Business Analyst, Solution Designer, and Developer are the core roles that worry us. I can look at what all the BAs, SDs, and Developers are doing in User Utilization and see if we have problems on the near horizon. I’m not sure I got at what you’re looking for…keep the questions coming. Thanks, Eric
