Capacity Planning: How to ensure alignment between corporate strategy and resources
Every year, companies review their strategic plans. This process, crucial to the organization's direction, allows us to define both the roadmap and the strategic priorities, while validating the budget required to achieve them.
Capacity planning plays a central role in this process. The aim is to ensure that the company has the human, material and financial resources it needs to carry out its projects and day-to-day operations. There are many issues at stake:
- Guarantee the availability of skills and the ability of teams to execute strategic projects;
- Intelligently combine available bandwidth between new initiatives and ongoing activities (support/maintenance, business activities);
- Roll out the plan operationally to ensure that each team mobilizes its teams in line with the company's challenges;
- Be able to
The capacity plan
Capacity planning aims to align human, material and financial resources with business needs. It can be used at different levels of granularity (company, project, team), to :
- Assessing resource requirements ;
- Analyze available capacity ;
- Adjust resource allocation to balance demand and capacity ;
- Optimize use of company resources (prioritize, arbitrate, etc.)
To be effective, a capacity plan must be regularly updated to check that actions are in line with forecasts. This update also enables the company to adapt to unforeseen events.
Overall operation
Capacity management is based on two main processes:
- Defining the company's strategic plan ;
- Operational management of resources according to needs & priorities.
The strategic plan
The strategic plan is often linked to the company's annual budget exercise. Its main objectives include:
- Defining the company's transformation roadmap (strategic projects) ;
- Drawing up a global budget for the coming year;
- Synchronization with team capacities to ensure proper execution of the plan.
The process can be summarized as follows:
- Operational requirements feedback(RUN): This includes all activities necessary for the smooth running of the company (HR, finance, maintenance, customer care, etc.);
- Feedback on needs linked to transformation projects(CHANGE or BUILD): This corresponds to strategic priority projects, defined according to the stakes and expected gains.
Based on this feedback, the company can accurately assess resource and skill requirements, while measuring their impact on the ability of teams to execute projects effectively.
Operational management
Operational management is based on the company's global plan, which it applies to each team in order to control the internal and external capacities needed to achieve objectives.
Essential questions to ask include:
- Are current resources sufficient to implement the plan?
- Should we anticipate internal or external recruitment or team adjustments during the year?
The main objective is to ensure that human and material resources are aligned with the company's needs and priorities. This involves :
- Anticipating recruitment needs;
- Adjusting skills and budgets to avoid under-utilization or imbalances.
Each manager must therefore :
- Check that your budget is sufficient for your activities;
- Validate the availability and skills of allocated resources ;
- Ensure that all team resources are correctly allocated.
Construction du plan de charge d’entreprise
La construction du plan de charge d’entreprise peut être comparée à remplir un vase. D’abord, on comptabilise les activités essentielles, telles que :
- HR activities (training, management, seminars, etc.) ;
- Business processes (support functions and service production) ;
- Support and maintenance.
Then we add the costs associated with the company's transformation projects. From there, you need to reconcile :
- Budget requirements ;
- Strategic priorities ;
- The constraints of the various entities.
Using this information, a matrix of resource requirements can be drawn up (by month, by team, by skill), enabling managers to validate that their team is correctly sized to meet the objectives of the transformation plan.
Lack of anticipation
The staffing problem is the main risk observed (and unfortunately often realized) in transformation programs. It is one of the main reasons for delays, and yet it is often poorly managed, while at the same time there is an increase in team turnover over the duration of a program.
A few months' anticipation is possible thanks to well-managed capacity plans.
An essential link: from business needs to operational requirements
Visit business plan provides an overview of tasks to be accomplished and priorities. It helps define resource requirements and establish a clear trajectory.
Sur le plan opérationnel, les macro tâches doivent être déclinées en tâches détaillées plus spécifiques, idéalement sur une durée inférieure à deux semaines et pour une charge de travail de moins de dix jours. Elles peuvent ensuite être assignées aux ressources en fonction de leur disponibilité et de leurs compétences.
To be effective, this kind of planning requires good visibility. It's not a question of immediately detailing the entirety of a project lasting a year or more, but of dividing up the work progressively, in stages, while taking account of unforeseen circumstances. Agile methodology, for example, is based on the same principle, with PI Planning (Program Increment) carried out every three months, enabling objectives and tasks to be planned for the following three months, divided into two- to three-week sprints. Although this approach is commonly used in IT teams, it can be adapted to any type of project.
A link to evolve
Once priorities and activities have been defined, the business plan should not be put aside. Maintaining a link between this strategic plan and the operational plan is essential to :
- Guarantee the proper execution of the business plan in response to the objectives set;
- Align operational priorities with corporate challenges;
- React quickly to unforeseen events and adjust decisions accordingly.
Un suivi régulier est crucial. Du point de vue du plan de charge, une révision trimestrielle est souvent nécessaire pour actualiser les informations et réévaluer les portefeuilles de projets. Cela inclut l'actualisation du plan capacitaire et l’identification d'éventuels écarts en termes de ressources disponibles suite à des problèmes imprévus. Elle permet aussi d’arbitrer de nouveaux sujets ou changer les priorités suite à des évènements internes ou externes.
Operational planning and adaptation
Operational planning, depending on the steering mode and the maturity of the teams, is carried out at varying frequencies and helps define the upcoming sprint. The key points to watch are :
- The breakdown of strategic tasks into sufficiently detailed operational tasks;
- Update the status and remaining work for each task;
- Assigning tasks to available resources for the coming period.
It's essential that all teams are committed to these updating processes, as hazards will inevitably arise.
Hazards that impact planning
Two types of events can disrupt operational planning:
- Corporate events: A change in management, market developments or new regulations may alter the priorities of the business plan during the year;
- Événements opérationnels : Un retard, un problème de santé d'un membre clé, ou un incident technique (comme un bug majeur) peuvent impacter directement le planning et affecter, par ricochet, l'ensemble du projet.
That's why fluid communication and rapid feedback are essential to facilitate decision-making.
Key success factors for optimized capacity management
To ensure effective, proactive capacity management, certain key factors must be in place. These elements ensure consistent, responsive planning, while maintaining a strong link between strategic vision and day-to-day operations:
- Automatic link between strategic plan and operational schedules ;
- Mise à jour trimestrielle du plan de charge global via un processus de consolidation et de validation ;
- Planning ceremonies for each team :
- Each team adjusts the frequency of sprints and the level of detail of tasks according to its activity and maturity;
- The schedule is updated at the end of each sprint with dates and remaining tasks.
- Processus d’arbitrage et d’escalade pour analyser l’impact des nouveaux événements, besoins ou priorités sur le plan de charge.
Tabsters to align your resources with your strategic plan
By implementing these best practices, you ensure more agile planning, adapted to the constant evolution of projects. Tools such as Tabsters make this easy, thanks to :
- Une automatisation de la consolidation et du calcul des plans de charge à tous les niveaux hiérarchiques ;
- Centralized management of resources and skills;
- Customized visual reports for real-time monitoring of capacities, availabilities and loads;
- Intuitive dashboards to support steering ceremonies and make informed decisions;
- A data cube offering a real-time vision adapted to each profile (senior management, PMO, department director, manager, etc.).
With the right processes and tools in place, like Tabsters, you can turn planned capacity into a performance driver for the whole organization. All players share your company's challenges, and have the right roadmap.
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