Resource planning · 3 min read
Assigning people to projects seems simple while there are only a few projects. How to build capacity planning that protects both your people and your deliverables.
In many services firms, each project manager plans their own team independently, on a spreadsheet or a calendar. The system holds up as long as people work on one project at a time. As soon as someone is shared across several initiatives, the overlaps begin: two project managers count on the same person for the same week, each convinced they have them to themselves.
The effects show up on two fronts. People end up with unsustainable workloads, work evenings and lose motivation. Projects slow down, because the person in demand cannot be in two places at once, and deadlines are missed without anyone having really done anything wrong.
The first thing to do is make each person’s total workload visible by adding up all their assignments across all projects. A grid with people in rows and days or weeks in columns is the simplest and most effective tool, provided it is the single source of truth and every project manager uses it.
The grid needs clear thresholds. A practical benchmark is to flag in red any day over eight hours and any week over forty. This doesn’t mean overtime is banned outright, but that it must be a conscious choice rather than a surprise.
It is just as important that the grid is shared. If each project manager only sees their own assignments, overload stays invisible to the very people who could fix it. The overall view must be available to everyone who plans, as well as to management.
Nobody spends eight hours a day on project work. Internal meetings, training, helping colleagues, sales and admin tasks all take up time that has to be accounted for. Planning everyone at their theoretical maximum means being behind from day one.
It also helps to distinguish between confirmed assignments and tentative ones linked to opportunities not yet signed. Tentative assignments help forecast future demand, but they shouldn’t tie people up on projects that may never start.
Planned absences, such as vacation and training, belong in the same view. A forgotten week of vacation is as damaging as an unreported overload.
Planning is a forecast; logged hours tell you what really happened. Comparing the two regularly helps improve future estimates and pinpoint the projects that take up more time than expected.
The utilization rate, meaning the share of available hours spent on billable work, is a useful indicator if read with balance. Utilization that is too low signals untapped capacity; utilization that is consistently very high signals a team with no slack for the unexpected, training or improvement. Neither extreme is healthy for long.
Recurring gaps between planned and actual hours are also a valuable lesson for whoever prepares proposals: if certain tasks consistently take longer than expected, sales estimates need to be adjusted accordingly.
Capacity planning works when it becomes a weekly habit rather than a one-off exercise. All it takes is a short review in which project managers go through the grid for the coming weeks together, resolve conflicts and flag future needs to management.
In Sales, resource planning shows each person’s workload across all projects, with cells turning red above eight hours a day or forty a week, and approved timecards feed the reports on utilization and hours per person. The tool helps you see, but the decision remains a human one: protecting people from overload is the responsibility of whoever does the planning, and a good overall view makes that responsibility much easier to carry out.
Weekly review
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