Capacity Planning

Resource capacity planning is a critical function of portfolio management. It is about comparing future resource utilization of project resources against the available capacity to do work.

Utilization is the amount of effort a person spends on work (project work, operational work, etc.) during a given amount of time.

Capacity is the standard amount of time available to do work.

In order to accurately measure utilization and capacity across the portfolio for each resource role we need to know:

  • All the projects in the portfolio,

  • The forecast utilization for that role for each project in the portfolio for a given time period,

  • The amount of non-project work time for that role for a given time period,

  • The standard available working time for that role.

Collecting this information for a given resource pool is at the heart of capacity planning and enables us to answer two fundamental questions:

  • When do we have the capacity to commit to additional work?

  • Are resources available to complete our committed work?

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