5 Examples of Capacity Planning Reports – The Digital Project Manager

You’re likely to have done a lot of horse-trading to ensure that your project teams have the right mix of skills, experience, and, perhaps most importantly, availability. Your ability to connect the right resources to the right projects is what makes a project successful.
You can avoid overburdening your existing staff or delegating difficult tasks to inexperienced staff by being able to properly resource your projects. How do you do that?
This is where capacity planning reports really shine. It is the foundation of any Business Intelligence (BI) framework. It quantifies your project’s cost and gives you precise effort estimates for the future. It ensures that projects you are able to accept have the necessary knowledge and experience. This means that you are no longer in the dark about what activities take up your team’s time.
These 5 essential capacity planning reports that focus on resource excellence will help you think more strategically about resourcing.
Similar Read: Capacity Planning for Every PM: Strategies + Complete How-To
1. Forecasting Reports on Capacity and Demand
Capacity management analyses your resource capacity in advance. Intuitive resource management solutions such as Saviom Software provide capacity planning reports that calculate future capacity based on current demand patterns. It provides optimal performance and allows for future investments. First, it allows you to detect and resolve any deviations from your task objectives early on. Your team members can also support each other on different work areas and keep track of upcoming training dates to improve their skills.
First, create a skills inventory. Next, list down the most important skills and knowledge you require. Next, you will need to find the right staff. This will allow you to restructure your company and eliminate obsolete skills. Project management allows you to identify feasible projects that could become real work by using demand forecasting. These future commitments can be communicated to your resources in advance so that they can prepare for them and then upskill as the actual deployments get closer. Capacity and intuitive demand forecasting reports monitor all-round availability during peak- and off-season periods in a financial calendar year so that your company is not affected by fluctuations in people’s movements.
2. Booked Versus Actuals Reporting Function
You’re in luck if you want to unite resource efforts and hours. The Forecast Versus Actual Time report, also known as the Booked Versus Reals, consolidates all time-sensitive bookings so that you can accurately estimate the future investments of your resources.
The ‘Booked hours’ refer to your project budget estimates, while the Actual’ hours are taken from your staff’s timesheets. Saviom’s Enterprise Schedule console allows you to view a summary of project bookings. You can also pull information from external schedules to directly pull timesheets so that you can compare the data against future estimates in real time. You can minimize the gap between your booked efforts and actual work by identifying how core tasks are distributed, while also accounting for non-BAU work. Any differences in hours, whether they are an increase or decrease, will be highlighted to alert you to values that are too high or low.
3. Utilization Percentage Rate Reports
Resource utilization rates are a measure of your staff’s long term productivity and allow you to allocate balanced workloads. Over-using your staff can cause stress and lead to a chaotic schedule that leaves no one accountable. Tow