Capacity planning is a key aspect of strategic portfolio management and allows organizations to assess their capacity based on the demand pipeline.
This feature will allow users to maintain and monitor the overall demand for different resource groups (skills) on a yearly, quarterly or monthly basis. It will be possible to make allocation of resources to projects from a pool of resource groups maintained separately. Over utilization or under utilization of the resources per project or resource groups can be quickly visualized allowing the organization to make strategic decisions like re-prioritizing their projects or altering their execution schedule.
Setup
In order to use this feature, the Administrator has to configure the following,
1 Go to Configure > Workspace and turn on the Enable Capacity Plan setting.
2 Go to Members > Manage Members and set up the member permission Capacity Planning on members and roles as needed. Only the members with this permission will be able to use the capacity planning feature in Focal Point.
3 Click on the capacity planning icon in the top menu bar. This would display the capacity planning user interface. Under the Actions menu, click on the Configure Capacity Plan option. In the configure user interface, the Administrator needs to identify three modules and views needed for storing the required information.
a Projects - This is the module where the project informations are stored and the requests for demand are raised.
b Allocations - This is the module where allocations of resources to projects are stored.
c Roles - Resources are grouped by roles/skills. Projects can request the roles/skills they need. Each role/skill element will also store the organizational resource capacity in a time grid attribute.
4 From the Projects module, identify four mandatory attributes.
a Resource demand attribute. This is a time grid attribute with a single sheet. Focal Point would use this attribute to store the resource demand per skills/roles.
b Attributes for storing the project start and end dates.
c A linklist attribute pointing to the Roles/Skills module. Project demand for a role/skill can be raised using this attribute.
d Two additional attributes can also be selected here. These project attributes will be displayed in the capacity plan grid view.
5 Roles/Skills module is used for storing details about each resource skills/roles that a project can request for. From the Roles/Skills module, identify one attribute.
a Skill/Role capacity attribute. This is a time grid attribute with a single sheet and a single row which is used to store the resource capacity per skills.
6 Allocations module is used for storing project allocation for specific skills/roles. One allocation element is created for allocation from each project. From the Allocations module, identify two attributes.
a Resource allocation attribute. This is a time grid attribute with a single sheet. Focal Point would use this attribute to store the resource allocation per skills/roles for each project.
b A link attribute pointing to the Projects module. This will store the link from each allocation back into the project element.
After the configuration of the capacity plan is completed, a regular user can start using the tool based on his access to different views.
7 Requests for roles/skills can be raised by going to Actions > Assign Role to Project. You can a select a specific role/skill element and add that to a single project or all projects.
8 After a role/skill is added to a project, you can start adding the demand and allocations for that role/skill by editing grid cells directly. You can even enter the demand and allocation details by multi-editing. For these, users can click on Actions > Edit Single Column or Actions > Edit Single Row menus.
9 The charts and graph can be used to compare the demand, allocation and capacity for different skills. Over Allocation and Under Allocation can be easily identified by the color code of the cells in the grid layout.
10 Use the menu option Visualize > Switch to role based view to group the demand and allocation based on roles/skills. Use this view to optimize the skill requirements across projects.