This template proposes a way of thinking about team capacity, using a decomposition into Projects & Needs. It uses the sum-of-hours-over-time technique presented in the first Klaro Cards Session on Capacity Management.

The best way to use this template is to view the background and proposal made during this session, on the Youtube video (in French):

The issue

Many projects in business involve teams that are not 100% dedicated. The same people or departments are involved in several projects at the same time. This situation is a source of inefficiency: difficult, asynchronous communication, bottlenecks, overworked employees and so on.

It's not always easy, or even possible, to correct this. One main reason is that a project often requires many skills, and therefore many people or departments, while the budget doesn't allow for all these people to be mobilized full-time throughout the project.

In the absence of a revolution in project management, we propose to make things a little clearer for you and your team, with a simple technique: make sure that no-one has to work more than full-time to meet the planned deadlines.

Suggested template

The template's model is quite simple: a breakdown of projects into needs. Rather than decomposing projects into tasks, proposed in another template, we prefer here to model needs.

A need is the presence of a person or department during a given period, for a certain effort estimated in hours. This is appropriately visualized using a Gantt view.

The model supports different types of estimates: total hours, per week, per month, etc. The model's calculations take these differences into account.

Wonder machine

The goal here is not to model operational reality in fine detail, but rather to visualize as a team the effect of assumptions (deadlines and estimates) on the workload of employees or departments.

The Gantt - Needs and Chart - Needs dashboards enable you to visualize the cumulative workload over time, by person or by department, and to discuss it as a team.

Gantt with sum of hours per time unit

Note that the Gantt view is configured to display the sum of hours by unit of time and selected grouping. For example, by project and week:

Or by department and month:

Equivalent chart view

As an alternative, a chart view with the time interval on the x-axis allows you to visualize these sums just as easily:

Using filters to sharpen discussions

Filters can be used at any time to make your discussions more real and concrete. By focusing on one project or another, for example, you can sharpen the focus of the discussion and/or address it in a sub-team:

Breaking out of task tracking

The template proposed here does not break down a project into assigned tasks, but rather favors a helicopter view of the workload. If you still wish to track the progress of your projects, a system of milestones per project is an alternative to tasks that remains macroscopic and fosters good team discussions.

For each project, simply list the current objective (e.g. what are we trying to achieve in 3 weeks' time) and what comes next. This allows you to cross-reference the workload analysis with a few operational ideas that can be discussed together: