Top 5 Capacity Report Types for Effective Project Management
Even with the best organizational principles, your processes will be incomplete without a timely capacity planning report.
In-depth analytics can bring significant benefits to current and future projects. They help deliver reliable utilization rates, monitor current capacity and resource usage, and support the analysis of performance trends across multiple projects.
If you want to know more about the process of managing your resources, check out our guide to effective capacity planning. Otherwise, keep reading for an in-depth exploration of the top insights for team capacity planning.
Free Capacity Planning Template
Download our template to schedule time for billable vs non-billable tasks, track workloads, and get insights into utilization with preset formulas.
Why Use a Capacity Planning Report?
A capacity report is here to complement your resourcing initiatives. Without effective reporting, you’ll be working blind. Some specific business considerations that are addressed by capacity reporting include:
- Who can take on more work, and who is overutilized
- Who is unavailable for work, and for how long
- Your financial metrics, such as budgets and profit margins
- Your future business requirements for accepting new client work
- Which services or positions to consider hiring for
The Benefits of Efficient Resource Management
Here’s a quick overview of the benefits of planning capacity with real-time data:
- Optimized resource allocation by ensuring that capacity meets customer demand
- Daily operations are aligned with long-term capacity planning
- Balanced employee workloads and increased satisfaction
- Better strategic workforce planning and capacity building plans
- Enhanced project delivery and client satisfaction
You can also check our guide on the main capacity planning challenges and how to overcome them successfully.
The Top 5 Reports for Agencies
From granular to top-down insights, here’s an overview of the top capacity planning reports that deliver your agency’s key performance metrics:
1. Employee Scheduling & Availability
To start off, Productive’s Resource Planning module gives you an overview of all the essential information you need to manage your resource capacity planning. This includes:
1. A visualization of your employee scheduling across projects and services
CHECK OUT A LIVE DEMO FOR PRODUCTIVE’S RESOURCE PLANNING MODULE
Your resource plan lists your employees, projects, and the services you offer. Productive contains employee details such as working hours, costs, and holidays to help you organize your capacity requirements.
Layouts can be switched between projects, people, and time off, depending on your preferred way of handling the capacity management process. These responsive overviews give you a variety of information at just one glance, including daily capacity, employee time off and holidays, and future availability.
2. Managing your resource availability with capacity indicators (heatmaps)
A capacity indicator visualizes your employee’s workload across time periods. These indicators will be red if your bookings exceed their availability, green if they are within availability, and half-filled if they are still available to be scheduled.
Adjust or turn off your heatmaps through Settings
This helps you make quicker decisions on which employees to schedule for more work and which might need offloading.
We’re able to see our schedule out for the next three months easily, and I can put in tasks where I know we have work coming up. That allows me to make sure that I’m not overbooking people or it lets me know where people are overbooked and that I need to get some resources to help us out with the workload. That’s been the biggest shift—at any time Bryan can ask me “Hey, when do we have free time available?” and I can tell him.
Learn how to support your business scheduling and efficiency with Productive.
3. Handling and visualizing future resource requirements
Use special types of bookings to plan out your future requirements. This includes:
- Creating placeholders for staff members who haven’t been hired yet. You can also use them to calculate how adding more capacity affects your project requirements, such as your budget or profit.
- Getting a head start on your planning, even if aspects of the project are unconfirmed with tentative bookings. This doesn’t affect your confirmed capacity, so you can handle your resources across project timelines without impacting crucial data.
VIEW YOUR DAY-TO-DAY ALLOCATION WITH PRODUCTIVE’S Capacity Planning Template
4. Additional features
You can also:
- Reallocate and manage your scheduling with drag-and-dropping
- Create and assign holiday calendars to resources to account for non-working days
- Set agency-specific categories of time off and allocate them to employees
- Handle and view time off requests through the platform
Get Streamlined Capacity Reports
Switch from multiple spreadsheets and tools to a single solution for capacity planning and real-time reporting.
2. Forecasted Billable Utilization by People
Billable utilization is one of the most important metrics for agencies. It’s the ratio of billable vs worked hours across your employees. Industry benchmarks usually suggest a utilization rate of around 70 to 90% for production-level staff, 60 to 80% for account management, and much less for senior and C-level positions (Promethean Research).
ANALYZE UTILIZATION ACROSS DEPARTMENTS, SENIORITY, AND OTHER METRICS
With Productive, you can visualize your utilization rate across various departments and employees. Not only this, but you can forecast utilization for future periods of time to determine your upcoming capacity. This can help you decide whether you can take on additional projects.
It can also guide your hiring efforts; for example, you can hire for consistently overutilized roles. Otherwise, you can consider organizing your sales to find potential clients for less utilized services.
GET EASY MONITORING OF YOUR AGENCY KPIS ACROSS TIME
You can also check your utilization by month to pinpoint seasonal trends in your historical performance. If you have months of high utilization, you can consider boosting your capacity with contractors. In low utilization months, you can plan to focus on upgrading current systems, upskilling and reskilling, employer branding events, and other internal improvements.
What does utilization tell you about your agency?
- High utilization signifies that your employees are delivering a lot of billable hours. This can be a good thing, as billable work translates to profit for your agency, but utilization rates that are too high can also mean that your employees might be overutilized. Periods of sustained high stress and workloads can easily lead to burnout and turnover.
- Low utilization means that significant time is being spent on non-billable work. It’s necessary to spend some time on non-billable work, as it’s important to the sustainable functioning of your agency. This includes administrative tasks, pitching for new projects, or employee education. However, spending a disproportionate amount of time on non-billable tasks can point to ineffective processes or miscommunication.
Find out more about utilization and forecasting in agencies:
3. Budgeting & Profitability Chart
Productive’s Resourcing module is also connected to your agency’s project budgeting. Once you’ve created your bookings, you can check how your projects are currently performing and will perform financially throughout the project timeline.
First is the Budgeting chart. It provides data on time that can be billed, time that has been allocated with bookings, the total budget for the project, and the budget spent so far. The best thing about this chart is that you can forecast these metrics for future periods — this means that you can find out exactly if or when your budget will run out based on your resourcing.
IN-DEPTH BUDGETING INSIGHTS ENSURE YOU’RE NEVER CAUGHT OFF GUARD
However, just because you’re running out of budget doesn’t mean you have cause for worry just yet. Switch to the Forecasting Chart to see how your revenue and profit margins are faring.
LET RELIABLE DATA ON KEY Capacity Planning Metrics GUIDE YOUR DECISIONS
Let’s see how these charts could be used in a practical situation. For example, if a client asks for changes in the scope, you can create bookings for the new project tasks. Then, you can check out how this addition to the product roadmap affects the budget and your profitability. This can help you decide whether to adjust the scope request, accept it, or reject it outright.
Forecasting Charts have assisted our organization significantly. The way you can see, at a glance, that your team is allocated, to how much of the budget you have remaining or to see whether the budget has been invoiced, is obviously extremely insightful.
There are various types of reports you can use to get a slice of this data, such as:
- Forecasted vs. Budgeted Hours: Depicts the difference between budgeted and scheduled hours, which points to your project’s financial performance.
- Forecasted Unprofitable Budgets: Depicts which projects will be unprofitable in the future based on your current resourcing.
- Forecasted Budget Usage: Depicts your total budgets per project, your forecasted budget burn, and forecasted remaining amounts.
Check out our article on how to calculate the project profitability formula to learn more.
4. Estimated vs Actual Time per Service
With Productive’s Time Tracking feature, you can easily manage your employees’ billable and non-billable hours. This includes:
- A built-in timer with a desktop widget for easier management
- Manual entry, which lets you pin your most frequently used services and projects
- Automatic time tracking, which automatically creates time entries that match your resource bookings
With this feature, you can check how much time was estimated to be spent on delivering a certain service and then compare it to your time entries. This data can then be used to help you analyze your past performance and create more accurate time estimates in the future (see more: managing billable hours vs hours worked).
SUPPORT YOUR POST-PROJECT CAPACITY PLANNING ANALYSIS
You can also use this type of report to guide your resource management for future business opportunities. For example, if your work time was significantly lower than your estimated time, this means that you can consider assigning fewer resources for similar projects and vice versa.
Check out our list of the top professional services time tracking software to learn more about specialized solutions for teams of all shapes and sizes.
You can also find out how to calculate your project’s schedule variance percentage formula.
5. Employees Out of Office
Productive’s Resourcing also includes time off management. This means you can create categories of time off, process requests through the platform, and use this information to create useful reports.
You can:
- Create reports for employees out of the office on a specific day or during a certain period of time (next week, next month, etc.)
- Check time off used vs time off allocated per employee across various categories, such as vacation, sick leave, or maternity leave
MANAGE YOUR EMPLOYEE AVAILABILITY
Productive’s Reporting offers many more types of insights built from data pulled from various data sources, including features such as Budgets, Resourcing, Invoices, Projects, Time Entries, and more.
Building a Capacity Report With Management Software
Creating reports using spreadsheet software numbers can be a time-intensive process. In fact, according to a report by Wellingtone, more than 20% of agency professionals spend more than two days manually collating project reports.
Additionally, the smallest mistake can lead to significant consequences — Excel errors have been well-reported, and it’s believed that 9 out of 10 spreadsheets contain errors (Forbes).
Using a capacity planning tool like Productive makes this process significantly more straightforward.
GROUP AND FILTER YOUR DATA BY AGENCY-SPECIFIC PARAMETERS
To build a report with Productive, you can:
- Use one of the 40+ agency-focused templates from the Reports Library
- The report will be generated automatically from data on the platform
- Your reports can contain a data table, a visualization, or both — you can switch from Column, Line, Area, Bar, Donut, or Metric views
- Customize your reports with various filters (select the dates, clients, employees, etc. you want to include) and group data by different metrics
- Create custom fields to account for agency-specific parameters
- Save your report, set who will be able to see it, and define which category it belongs to for later access
- Automate the process of sharing data by syncing your reports with email or Slack
- You can also create a report from scratch and use all of the capabilities already mentioned
We can pull up data really quickly now, tailor it to our needs, and create all kinds of reports in a fraction of the time compared to before.
Check out our article on the best reporting tools to learn more.
Streamline Your Capacity Management With Productive
Productive is your all-in-one software for agency management, tailored specifically to agency workflows. Along with organizing your capacity management process and agency analytics, Productive can also:
- Organize collaboration across projects and tasks
- Help you manage your budgets
- Streamline the billing process
- Support lead management with a Sales Pipeline
- Make workflows more efficient with Automations
- Manage who can see and do what with the Permission Builder
- And much more
Book a demo with Productive today to optimize your capacity planning and project reporting.
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