Understanding Capacity Planning
This section discusses:
Capacity planning in PeopleSoft Resource Management.
Terminology that is relevant to capacity planning.
Capacity planning high-level process steps.
Capacity Planning enables the Executive and IT management teams to commit to the highest priority projects and other demands with confidence, knowing that sufficient resource capacity exists within the organization. Capacity planning provides management with the:
Ability to create and join a supply and demand forecast that highlights future resource gaps and surplus.
Ability to create resource plans to resolve future resource imbalances.
Capacity Planning is an integral piece of functionality for the Project Portfolio Management and Information Technology (IT) governance markets. It is the merger and balance of human resources (supply) and work to be done (demand) to achieve and sustain peak operational efficiency.
PeopleSoft Resource Management provides IT and development organizations with capacity planning functionality to empower managers who make important demand commitment decisions based upon limited resources or capacity information. Capacity planning is primarily concerned with long-term projections and decisions about your organization's resource demand and supply.
After IT and development organizations have made important demand commitment decisions based upon their strategic capacity planning, pool managers, resource managers, and program managers need to execute upon those commitments. At an operational or day-to-day level, difficult resource decisions must be made over the course of a project to be successful. Some operational challenges—such as high resource turnover rates, extended vacations or illness on the part of key resources—cannot be forecast with Capacity Planning.
By logically grouping resources together, resource pools enable efficient resource management, while supply categories allow for classification of resources more interchangeably. Generic resource allocation enables managers to reserve pool capacity, and supply category analytics improve visibility of resource capacity.
This table describes terms that are relevant to capacity planning:
|
Term |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Supply Forecast |
A supply forecast is an aggregated projection of all labor resource capacity based on resource pool headcount forecasts and capacity. |
|
Demand Forecast |
A demand forecast is an aggregated projection of all labor resource demand from projects and external data sources. |
|
Commitment Line |
A commitment line is the point at which a prioritized list of demand is separated into committed versus deferred. |
|
Capacity Planning Consolidated Scenario |
A complete capacity planning scenario consists of a version of the supply forecast, a version of the demand forecast, a commitment line and list of assumptions. |
|
Supply Categories |
Supply categories are specific resource attributes that are commonly used for capacity planning, availability and reporting purposes. The supply categories are project role, region, resource pool, and personnel status. |
|
Resource Pools |
Resource pool setup is an integral part of capacity planning, and is based on how your company wants to organize your resources based on such factors as location, job function, team, application, and so on. A resource pool is a collection of resources that are distinctly different from a project team or human resources (HR) department that is used for management and planning purposes. An administrator or pool manager defines the resource pools in the system, and assigns a manager for each pool. A pool manager can then add, update, or remove resources from pools. |
|
Project Manager |
A project manager is responsible for the planning, estimating, resourcing, and execution of a project. |
|
HR Manager |
An HR manager is responsible for the budgeting, supervision, and performance review of a group of resources that is typically assigned to a department or cost center. |
|
Resource Pool Manager |
A resource pool manager is responsible for the management and capacity planning of a group of resources. |
The capacity planning process can be described with these steps:
Executives organize resources into meaningful resource pools and set resource utilization percentages at the regional level.
Pool managers forecast capacity percentages for each resource role in their pool and account for future capacity.
The program manager creates the initial supply forecast model showing total capacity for each resource pool by using the capacity percentages combined with the preset region-based utilization percentages.
Once a supply forecast is created, executives can adjust capacity and regional utilization percentages to create different supply forecasts from the original model to analyze alternate scenarios.
The program manager creates the initial demand forecast, which is combined with supply forecasts to create consolidated scenarios for what-if analysis.
The flexibility of this conditional analysis helps management determine the optimal balance of available resources and pending work for the projected time period.
The project manager can add generic resources with supply categories to the project resource list and requests assignments. The project manager creates a generic resource request, and has the option to automatically request generic and named resources during Microsoft Project (MSP) integration. The pool managers can view supply category capacity, allocation and availability by week, at the pool and role level. The project manager can view individual resource availability based on project assignments and activity assignments. After pool managers have viewed the supply category analytic information, they can transfer resources from one pool to another pool, or do a mass transfer of assignments from one resource to another resource. The pool managers can then update generic allocations to named resource assignments.