Resource planning

Resource planning is essential for any organization's success, helping teams achieve their goals by efficiently managing key resources. This article shows how Asana can simplify the planning of crucial resources like time and people. Asana workflows make it easier for a project manager to plan these resources effectively.

Consider the example of Kevin, a PMO lead who manages a team of PMOs. Here’s how he uses Asana to optimize his team’s resource planning.

Capturing and creating work

Kevin sets up an intake project to capture work requests for his team. The project receives submissions via a form, capturing all the necessary details in a single task, which is then quickly converted into a project.

Once the team’s projects have been stood up, Kevin uses the capacity planning feature to staff them appropriately. A project-level view of the team’s capacity provides him with a clear foundation for allocating people to projects, both immediately and in the future.

Staffing and bandwidth

Capacity planning displays the PMO team’s bandwidth at the project level, and conflicts are surfaced immediately so staffing decisions can be made with confidence. Kevin easily spots an opportunity and allocates a member of his team, Amy, to a project. He allocates 25% of her available time to the project over two weeks, complemented by another team member contributing 75% of their time.

Visit this section of the capacity planning article for a detailed overview of how to create and edit project allocations.

Deciding where to invest a team’s time and effort is at the heart of project management. To get an accurate overview of the PMO team’s current work, Kevin creates a portfolio and adds all of his team’s projects to it. Now, Kevin can quickly identify work that is yet to be kicked off based on the project status clearly displayed in the portfolio. Identifying two projects that are ready to go, he begins to assign work to his team.

Sticking with the portfolio, Kevin can quickly switch to portfolio workload view and shows the team’s bandwidth. Portfolio workload also surfaces tasks that are unassigned, so that Kevin and his team don’t have to sort through project after project to find them. This means a PMO lead can assign tasks amongst their team with confidence that they will not be overburdened.

Planning for time

Until now, Kevin has kept his focus on long-term planning, but the focus can also be narrowed, uncovering insights into specific tasks and more immediate time periods. Using a combination of formula custom fields and portfolio dashboard, it’s possible to create a chart which tracks the disparity between estimated time and actual time spent on tasks across the projects in the portfolio - all done without any manual calculation.

Kevin’s team is using Asana’s native time tracking feature in projects within the portfolio. This means that time entries are constantly providing an accurate picture of time spent on tasks, which allows for more accurate time planning going forward. Where tasks don’t match their allotted time, whether tracking over or under their estimates, the information is collated and displayed in the portfolio dashboard. Then, the PMO team can make data-based time planning decisions with confidence.

Kevin is determined to minimize delays, and wants to remove any obstacles in his team’s way. As a final step, he uses Asana's Smart Answers feature to ask Asana Intelligence about blockers in his team’s project. Asana’s AI swiftly identifies the root causes of delays in projects that are at risk, and Kevin notes these points to discuss them with his project manager at their next meeting.