Capacity Planning High-Level Process Steps

The capacity planning process can be described with these steps:

1. Executives organize resources into meaningful resource pools and set resource utilization percentages at the regional level.

2. Pool managers forecast capacity percentages for each resource role in their pool and account for future capacity.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.