One Place

Capacity Planning

• Introduction
• Specifying Availability
• Granting Scheduling Permissions
• Scheduling Work
• Capacity Planning Report
• Exporting Capacity Planning Data

Introduction

Capacity Planning is the process of assigning out work to your team in such a way that doesn't over-schedule anyone based on their availability, ensuring that the work that needs to get done gets done. OnePlace provides the ability for managers to schedule work for team members, but also provides controls which ensure those members won't be scheduled for more work than they are capable of doing during the time they have available. Managers can see at a glance the free/busy time that team members have over a given time period, which aides in planning out the work to be done.

Specifying Availability

Capacity Planning requires knowing how much time a person has available each day to work, factoring in other commitments. A user's availability to work can be specified on the Settings | Personal Profile dialog via the Availability tab. The time specified on this tab is for a generic week (Sunday through Saturday). If your availability on specific days varies from week-to-week, you will need to update these values accordingly each week.

Note that when you schedule work for yourself, the availability specified on the Personal Profile dialog is not used. OnePlace allows you (and only you) the ability to over-schedule yourself.

Granting Scheduling Permissions

By default, no one can schedule work for you but yourself. In order to allow others (such as your manager or team lead) to add work to your schedule, you need to grant this permission. To do this, go to Settings | Personal Account Settings | User Preferences | Tasks, and change your "Scheduling Permissions" option to one of the following:

• Allow my manager to schedule work for me - This option grants scheduling permissions to the person who is designated as your manager in OnePlace. The "Manager" designation is done on the Personal Profile dialog via the General tab.
• Allow anyone to schedule work for me - This option grants scheduling permissions to anyone that you share a workplace with.

Scheduling Work

Two other requirements for Capacity Planning are knowing how long a task is expected to take (i.e. the estimated effort), and when this task will be worked on (i.e. the "scheduled on" date). Both of these inputs are highlighted on the Task dialog below. In this example, the person the task is assigned to (Bill) has granted scheduling permissions to his manager (Frank), who is creating a task for Bill. Because Bill granted Frank this permission, the "scheduled on" input is available for Frank to specify when Bill should work on this task. Had Bill not granted this permission to Frank, the "scheduled on" input would not be available.

When the person the task is assigned to does not have sufficient availability given the estimated effort and "scheduled on" date, a warning message is displayed at the top of the dialog when the user attempts to save the task.

The logical thing to ask is "When is this person available to work on this task?". Luckily, answering this question is simple. Just click on the "View availability" link next to the "Assigned to" user, and a small window will pop up showing you Bill's free/busy time over the next two weeks. Free time displayed with a bolded font indicates dates that this person has enough available free time to handle the estimated effort of the task.

If you click on one of the dates shown in this window, the window will close, and that date will be entered into the "schedule on" date input. You can also use the Previous/Next links at the bottom of the window to go forward or backward two weeks at a time.

Importing Tasks

The rules for not overloading people with work is also enforced when importing tasks into OnePlace. The screen shot below shows what happens when you import tasks, but one or more of the tasks in the import file exceeds the availability for the "Assign to" user. It's important to note that when this happens, the entire import will fail (not just the individual rows that had errors), so nothing gets imported. In this case, you will need to modify the import file and then try importing it again.

Capacity Planning Report

OnePlace provides a Capacity Planning report (under the "Reports" button in the toolbar at top of page) that is helpful for getting an overview of the free/busy time for your team over a specific time frame.

To run this report, go to Reports, and click on the "Capacity Planning Report" link in the left-hand navigation menu. Options for setting up the report will appear on the right side of the page. The "Teammates" list box allows you to select one or more of your teammates to include in the report. The "Week" box allows you to select which week you would like the report based on. The "Options" box provides the ability to include just free hours, just busy hours, or both in the report.

Click the "Show Report" button when you are ready to view the report.

Here is an example of the Capacity Planning report (based on the set up shown in the screen shot above):

Exporting Capacity Planning Data

The Capacity Planning report can also be exported to a CSV file. This allows you to use this information in another application, such as an Excel spreadsheet. Shown below is an example of the Capacity Planning report shown above, exported to to CSV (commas omitted for clarity).