Capacity plans give leaders the ability to optimize resourcing decisions by visualizing project staffing over long periods of time. Unlike workload, which manages task assignments, capacity plans allow you to allocate individuals to entire projects and get a high-level view of how people are staffed across workstreams.
Note that capacity plans and workload are not connected at the moment. A colleague may be allocated to a project in a capacity plan, yet have no tasks assigned to them yet, or vice versa.
Creating a capacity plan
To set up a capacity plan, navigate to Reporting, under the Insights section of the left bar. Click the + Create button and select Capacity plan.
Allocate resources
Next, add your team by clicking the + Add people button in the top-left corner and selecting the teammates who you would like to staff on projects.
Once you’ve added your team, it’s time to allocate resources. Staff your team across various projects by clicking their profile picture in the capacity plan and selecting + Add project to allocate. Add projects that people are currently working on and will work on in the future to get a long-term overview of your team’s capacity.
If a colleague already has projects allocated to them in other capacity plans, even by other people, you will still see those allocations. This assumes you have permission to see the projects involved, based on project privacy settings.
Creating and editing allocations
To create an allocation for a project, simply click where you want to add it. It will automatically create an allocation that matches the time zoom level (day, week, month).
You can extend or shrink these allocations by dragging on either end to the dates that you want. You can drag the entire allocation when plans change. You can also delete any allocations by selecting the allocation and pressing the delete key or right-clicking on them.
Bulk actions
You can bulk move and bulk delete allocations by holding the Ctrl or Command key, selecting the allocations, and either dragging them all together or pressing the delete key.
The example below shows how to bulk move, bulk reallocate, and bulk delete allocations.
Allocating multiple people to a single project
Multiple people can be allocated to a single project at once. You can view everyone who is staffed on a project by clicking the project name and viewing the project details, including role information.
View the gif below to see how to quickly open up project details without leaving the capacity plan.
Filter people
You can quickly filter down to specific teammates by name or job title. If you’d like to see the workload of just the IT team members, type IT, click Select all and Apply filter.
Note that job titles are managed through the admin console. Depending on your organization's settings, they can also be managed by each individual.
Manage how capacity is measured
When planning a project, decide how you want to measure capacity. You can choose between Percent allocation, Estimated hours, or a simple Project count. It's best to be consistent with whatever option works best for your team.
Percent allocation
Percent allocation is the most common and straightforward way to measure where people are spending their time without having to worry about calculating hours.
In the example below, Alan is due to dedicate 90% of his time to the Global System Overhaul project. Beverly is working on two projects whose dates overlap, and is due to spend 80% of her time on each. Since she’s going to be over capacity one week, the capacity is displayed in red, giving her, her team, or her manager some notice in order to shift things around or bring in some extra help for this time.
Project count
Project count simply shows the total number of projects a person is working on during the chosen time. In the example, we can see that Alan is working on one project some weeks, and two at a time on other weeks.
Estimated hours
Estimated hours is best if you precisely plan projects down to the hour and want to create allocations against these estimates. Estimated hours tends to be easiest when you're planning week by week because months have a varied number of working days.
Adjusting capacity
If you're working with Percent allocations or Estimated hours, you can adjust the capacity for each individual in the menu. You can make everyone's capacity the same or manually adjust each individual. For estimated hours, this applies to weekly capacity.
Notifications, privacy, and permissions
Notifications
Allocating people to a project using capacity planning does not notify them - users don’t get an inbox notification or email if they’ve been allocated to a project. This is ideal for planning in advance, since you can make changes, try things out, and even start over - all without confusing your team with notifications or tasks until you’re ready to share.
Privacy and permissions
When someone is allocated to a project, that allocation lives on the project and is not specific to any single capacity plan.
This means, for example, that if a capacity plan exists where Alan is allocated to the Global Systems Overhaul project, and a colleague creates another capacity plan where they add Alan, they will see that he is allocated to the Global Systems Overhaul project for certain dates. This assumes the colleague has permissions to see such a project.