The Best Capacity Planning Template for Agencies

Not all capacity planning templates are made equal.

You could find various examples online or build them yourself in spreadsheet-based software. However, doing this manually can be frustrating and take a long time, not to mention that it leaves room for error.

Instead, consider managing your capacity planning process in a platform that integrates time tracking, time off management, and in-depth financial insights. 

Keep reading to learn all about the benefits of creating an automated capacity plan and how to build one for your agency.

Productive’s Resource Planning feature can give you answers to the following questions:

We’ll take you through the key capabilities of Productive’s Resourcing to help you get the most out of your agency’s resources. This includes:

Consider how you would create a project capacity planning template with software such as Excel or Google Sheets. Imagine rows and columns of numbers and dates — it would be easy to get lost in this data. In fact, spreadsheet errors are more common than not.

Your resource capacity planning template will not be exempt, as research suggests that more than 90% of spreadsheets have errors, and half of all models in large businesses have material defects. Sometimes, these mistakes can lead to billions of lost revenue (see JP Morgan Chase).

And then there’s Productive, a powerful capacity planning software solution that contains all essential data on your project teams.

Productive’s Employment details contain all necessary information for optimal resource scheduling, including who your employees are, their availability, and their cost.

This includes:

 All of this key information is taken into account when creating your booking. You can also get a handy overview of how many hours you’ve already booked across a service (such as design or development) and how many you have left to account for.

Many errors can occur when changes are made to resource plans. For example, consider what happens if you want to extend or shorten a deadline for specific tasks: You’d have to manually move all dependencies and ensure all your calculations were redone accordingly.

Now picture doing this multiple times a week.

Productive avoids these issues altogether. You don’t have to re-do everything to make the smallest updates to your resource planning templates. If you want to edit an individual booking, you can use drag-and-drop — all information will be updated accordingly. You can also shift, extend, or delete entries in bulk.

Productive also offers repeated bookings for team members working on the same project every week, month, or every couple of weeks.

Additionally, Productive generates instant insights into your team resources. Forget about combing through mounds of data and collating reports with complex formulas — Productive provides a template library with more than 50 agency-focused Reports.

These templates can be additionally tailored with filters and agency-specific parameters through custom fields. 

For example, one of the capacity planning reports offered by Productive is Forecasted Billable Utilization by Person or by Month. This report shows your billable vs worked time and resulting billable utilization rate.

You can use these insights to make informed decisions for your long-term capacity planning — for example, if one of your services is underutilized, you can guide sales efforts to try and find clients for that particular department. Or, if certain services are highly utilized, you can consider hiring additional staff. 

Find out more about managing your agency’s utilization with Productive:

According to a study by BreatheHR, UK SMEs spend almost 19 hours a month managing employee leave. Not to mention the difficulties it can cause when analyzing key capacity planning metrics. Take the utilization rate as an example — if you’re examining capacity without accounting for actual team availability, your results will be unreliable.

With Productive, you can set various categories of leave, including paid vacations, half-days off, paid maternity or paternity leave, or more.

For example, you can define:

Requests are also handled from the platform, and once they have been approved, they’re immediately visible in your Resourcing. Additionally, time off bookings can be created similarly to regular bookings — just switch the tab.

See more: Project Resource Management: The Ultimate Guide

When you have employees from various countries, specific holidays can be difficult to account for. With Productive, you don’t have to worry about this. You can import holiday calendars for different countries and assign them to individual resources in their employment details.

Holidays are included in your team’s capacityand are displayed as non-working days. It’s also factored into your utilization report so you can get reliable data on employee efficiency.

Sometimes, all you need for a breakthrough is a change in perspective. Instead of building additional dashboards from the ground up, Productive lets you switch it up with one click.

Tailor your resourcing to your agency’s working style with three visual representations:

You can also use color-coded representations of resource availability, called capacity indicators or heatmaps, to balance workloads.

Creating an accurate schedule can be hard if you need to account for resources you don’t currently have, or if certain areas of the project are still waiting to be confirmed. Still, handling these circumstances is a key part of a project manager’s job.

Productive offers two types of bookings to help you plan for future demand: placeholders and tentative bookings.

Placeholders can be used to account for future staffing needs. You can also use placeholders to plan ahead and see how adding more capacity affects your project requirements.

Placeholders work like any other employee associated with your current project — they have their cost, working hours, and holiday calendars. You can also add them to your Reports to assess resource utilization and determine hiring needs.

Tentative bookings are another great way to scope out various possibilities. If you’re unsure if your booking will be needed but still want to account for the possibility, you can use tentative bookings to create a plan without impacting your confirmed capacity.

You can’t get successful capacity planning if you’re not tracking unbillable and billable hours. Without this data, your agency won’t be able to fully understand its production capacity and future resource availability or identify areas of improvement.

One of the big benefits of using an integrated capacity planning tool is exactly this — by combining various useful features in a single platform, you can get more complete insights into your crucial agency operations.

As agency management software, Productive offers a Time Tracking feature with a timer and manual entry, but you can also use automatic time tracking through the Resourcing module. This automatically creates time entries that match your resource bookings, so you can save your energy and free up your individual resources.

This also works retroactively, so you can fill in time entries for bookings created in the past.

Related: 7 Best Professional Services Time Tracking Software & Tools

Getting real-time data is essential to tackling a wide range of capacity planning challenges. With Productive, the allocation of resources is reflected immediately in your key agency metrics, such as budget burn, profitability, and profit margins.

In the Budgeting chart, you can view data such as:

In the Profitability chart, you can view data such as revenue, cost, profit, and profit margin across time. You can compare whether going over the budget still means the project is profitable, which helps you make better project and agency decisions.

Visualizing and forecasting this key agency data helps you gauge your actual cost, forecast future requirements, anticipate potential risk, and create timely contingency plans.

Related: The Capacity Model: Best Strategies for Agencies

Use permission sets to control which employees can do what. This helps protect sensitive data while providing key team members with essential information on project timelines and resource availability.

You can also build custom permission sets to cater to your team’s needs. Check out Productive’s Permission Builder to learn everything about managing your project visibility.

To summarize, using a dedicated resource management tool can bring many benefits to your agency’s capacity management:

There are other ways to manage your agency’s capacity requirements and ensure you meet customer demands. Productive is designed to support agency workflows with various integrated features, from project planning, task management, financial management and forecasting, client invoicing, and more.

Read the full story: How SOUP Got a Firm Hold on Their Projects Using Productive

Additional features include:

If you’re interested in managing your resource planning and more, book a demo with Productive today.