When your team is constantly working more than their capacity, it slows down all projects and results in poor quality outputs. Due to which training team suffers and so do the learners.The cause of these project malfunctions can range from demanding executives to drawn budgets. But there is one factor and that is common to nearly all of them is poor capacity planning and resource management.
These two project management terms are often poorly misunderstood and used ex-changeably. But they are different separate concepts that lead to different processes and end results. And understanding the role of each one is a censorious factor in maintaining a training team that runs smoothly, correctly prioritizes projects, and manages workload efficiently.
In this article we will understand about these concepts.
Understanding Capacity planning and resource Planning
Capacity Planning is vital in operations management. It helps in departmental decision making and impacts over all personnel and budget. It is a process of determining the production capacity required by an organization to meet changing demand for its products and its ultimate goal is to meet the present and future level of the requirement at the minimum wastage. There are many methods of capacity planning like tradition which often taken place on annual basis to feed into overall organizational strategic planning, and some are flexible and help organizations to be agile in response to market demands.
Based on capacity planning there are some notable differences between Traditional Methodology and Agile Methodology.
- Traditional method more focus on individual “Resources” or People while agile method more focus on the cross-functional team, and you’ll see resource/team frequently below when concepts apply to both.
- Approach of traditional method are more align with Resource and strategy while agile method typically focusses on value-streams and products.
Resources are expensive investment of an organisation and Resource Planning is a process of identifying, forecasting, and allocating many types of business resources to the projects at the right cost and right time. It also makes sure the efficient and effective use of resources across the enterprise. These business resources can be human, equipment, assets, and more. In other words, it’s the process of strategic planning to make the use of resources in best way depending on their capacity and availability by following a systematic process. Resource planning is a top to bottom process and discussion between Learning and Development management, line managers, and project managers. It helps to divide resources into individual training projects. It provides absolute plan for managers and lets them know which resources will be available to them. It can be also occurred on annual basis.
Identify which to focus on your business
Changes never stop in any organisation there is always more work than capacity. Capacity planning is the process of finding out what individual resource is currently doing across the organization. You’re essentially evaluating your capacity utilization. Performing this will help you to figure out what kind of resources you need to hire, what projects to follow. Capacity planning is critical for determining the overall direction of the company. If you know that your software engineers are constantly utilized, you know you need to hire more developers. It also tells you that your software development projects tend to be successful, and you should pursue more of them.
Utilization of resources, on the other hand, is the process of planning resources for a particular project or group of projects i.e., a portfolio. Resource project managers can reallocate works, change timelines, and take other measures to ensure project goals are met and workers are not underutilized, overutilized, or experiencing collapse. Resource managers also need to make sure dispute do not arise over the course of the project lifecycle.
Always remember that the difference between resource and capacity planning is not always clear, especially in small businesses.
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