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This template offers a breakdown of work into Projects & Tasks, using the percentage of full-time equivalent (%FTE) technique suggested in the first Klaro Cards Session on Capacity Management.
The ideal way to use this template is to view the background and proposal made during that session, on the Youtube video:
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 tasks, with each task having a deadline, a responsible person and an estimate in hours.
Based on the deadline, the estimate and the time already worked on the tasks, a calculated dimension %EFT is proposed:
%EFT = remaining-time / (number-of-weeks-until-deadline * 38h)
It calculates the number of full-time equivalents needed to meet the deadline if the estimate is correct (based on a 38h week, which you can easily change in its definition).
## 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 `% busy' dashboard lets you visualize the cumulative workload, by person or by department, and discuss it as a team. These discussions will enable you to refine your understanding of the expected results of a task, and to challenge estimates and deadlines so as to meet them without putting staff into burnout.
### Total FTEs per person
A simple dashboard showing managers in columns and using a sum of %FTEs at the bottom of the columns is enough to discover who won't meet their deadlines (e.g. Aurélien and Clara are well over 100%).
### Cumulative FTEs by department
Alternatively, by toggling the view to show departments in columns, you can check whether your schedules and estimates respect the size of your departments.
### 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:
## Where do deadlines and estimated costs come from?
The difficulty with this kind of modeling approach is that it is often difficult to obtain reliable deadlines and cost estimates. The time spent encoding this information may even outweigh the benefits.
With this template, we emphasize that the goal is not to model operations in detail, but to initiate the necessary team discussions. As a first step, we invite you to make a simple model:
Take the project deadline as the task deadline; this way, your task deadlines are optimistic:
You can also use the power of the Casino view to make half-day estimates quickly. Your estimates should be neutral or slightly pessimistic:
If, with such a template, you detect an overall full-time equivalent greater than 100%, you're almost certain that your assumptions are dangerous: with optimistic timeframes, you've already identified a department's under-capacity or an employee's overload.
If not, refine the deadlines or estimates for the people or departments with the heaviest workloads. This is where your project has obvious weaknesses.
