How do I draw up a workload plan?
More than two-thirds of our customers consider workload management to be the top priority when managing their project portfolio.
If you're visiting this page, chances are you share this priority.
Without a clear overview of available resources and their allocation, you run the risk of overloading your teams, demotivating them and exacerbating the strain on resources. Depending on the nature of your projects, good workload management also means effective management of your material resources.
In this article we've compiled some tips on how to effectively manage your project resources.
Discover the key points and essentials for good workload management :
- What is a workload plan?
- How do you draw up a workload plan?
- How do you build a workload plan?
- Discover PPM software Project Monitor to manage your resources
- 5 points to remember about planning
Follow our advice to maximize the use of your resources and stop launching projects "blindly", thinking that stewardship will follow...
What is a workload plan?
Defining your workload
A workload plan, also known as schedule or capacity schedule, is a tool for planning and monitoring the allocation of resources according to project needs.
The workload schedule lists :
- Current and future projects,
- Candidate projects await arbitration,
- The human resources needed to carry out these projects. We also talk about human resources, modeling skills, assignments and availability,
- Material resources, if the project requires shared resources (site machinery, IT resources, building, etc.).
It visualizes the volume of work to be carried out by each member of staff, and ensures that the workload is fairly distributed, taking into account the capacity, skills and availability of resources.
In other words, the workload plan models projects and resources to facilitate planning and optimize resource allocation.
A key tool for PMOs and resource managers
The workload plan is a collaborative tool that supports collective resource management exchanges. Stakeholders in the workload plan, such as PMOs, managers and project leaders, are involved according to their level of responsibility within the project portfolio, the project or the various project phases.
- PMOs take stock, compile requirements and refine estimates. They are the guarantors of the overall balance and respect for the value provided by the resources mobilized. Ideally, they act as the interface between managers and project leaders, facilitating arbitration and resource allocation.
- Project Managers identify and report on their project's needs. This work is constantly updated according to the progress and remaining work on their project.
- Managers are responsible for making resources available for projects. Ultimately, they make decisions on the allocation of resources under their responsibility, and where necessary call on external resources.
Resource planning is crucial for VYV3's GIE IT. It enables precise monitoring of the link between the strategic roadmap, drawn up with its members, and the progress of the annual workload plan. Thanks to near real-time visibility of resources, their availability and allocation, the company can continuously arbitrate on new project requests. As the workload follows a growth trend combined with pressure on IT resources, VYV3's challenge is to increase its capacity to handle projects. To identify and anticipate the need for increased capacity, capacity schedule is not just an operational tool, but also a strategic decision-making tool.
To find out more about our customers' resource planning approaches, read the testimonials from the PMOs at VYV3, Kuhn and L'Eurométropole de Strasbourg. In this article, they reveal how they arbitrate between projects and team availability and how they deal with the multiplicity of projects. Three PMOs, three resource planning approaches that secure project deliverability.
What is the purpose of schedule for your project portfolio?
A project portfolio workload plan is a strategic and operational tool that provides a global view of resource capabilities and workload. It is an essential element of project arbitration, demand management and portfolio alignment with the organization's strategic objectives and capabilities.
Workload management allows you to check the progress of projects within the given deadlines, the expected quality and the anticipated costs. It also helps to avoid situations of under- or over-staffing of employees.
A workload plan makes it possible to know "who does what" and to ensure the right distribution of resources. It provides answers to questions such as :
- "Who's working on which project?"
- "How busy are Project Manager profiles?"
- "Do we have the capacity to launch a new project?"
- Who's going to work on this task next week?
challenges load plan matrix :
| Levels | Resource | Project | Portfolio |
| Operational | Who will work on which task? Who will be working on the project in the coming week or month? Who will be assigned to other activities? | When will the task be completed? How long will the task take? What will the week's achievements be? | What is the team staffing level? What is the level of availability? What is the level of risk on the workload plan? |
| Tactics | Who will be available to work on the project? Who will work on which phase? What training is required? | What remains to be done? When should the various phases be scheduled? How much will the project cost? Should we subcontract part of the project? Call in external service providers? | How much will the project portfolio cost? What is the breakdown of resources by portfolio axis? What are the skill requirements? |
| Strategic | What are your recruitment needs? What are your subcontracting needs? | When will the project be completed and at what cost? Make or Buy project? Should we do the project or have it done? | What project can we launch? What is the project/recurring business breakdown? What is the sales forecast? |
How do you draw up a workload plan?
The load plan is a composite tool that brings together a wide range of data.
Its construction involves several key stages:
The prerequisites of a workload plan:
- Inventory of resources and work arrangements (part-time work, leave, etc.),
- Competency modeling,
- Load chart and model by project type,
- Inventory of non-project activities (vacations, departmental life, recurring activities, management, etc.),
- Explicit management mandate and sponsorship of resource management processes,
- Clear leadership structure (arbitration committee, allocation committee, portfolio review including reste-à-faire and allocation issues).
When creating a project :
Step 1: Information gathering
- List current and future projects in the portfolio, along with their expected duration (start and end dates),
- Identify the key stakeholders and decision-makers who will be involved in the workload planning process,
- Estimate the scope of the project,
- List the skills (generic resources) required,
- Estimate the overall workload for the main phases of the project.
Step 2: Resource allocation
- List available resources and their work capacity (working hours, part-time, working days, vacations, planned absences, etc.),
- List recurring activities that monopolize resources,
- Assign resources to the different phases of the project according to their skills, capacity and availability.
When monitoring projects :
Step 3: Monitoring resource allocation
- Adjust resource allocations according to unforeseen circumstances and specific constraints that may have an impact on projects,
- Keep the information up to date to ensure that the load plan remains accurate.
Depending on the situation, the PMO, project manager or resource manager may :
- Add more resources to speed up the process, while ensuring optimal phase planning
- Increase the time allocated to a phase, but check that this does not delay the work of other dependent phases.
- Calling on outside help
Other tips for calculating a project's load :
- Take into account the dependencies between phasesin order to estimate the total duration of the project. Some phases cannot be started until the preceding ones have been completed.
- Find out what the project's critical path is. This is the minimum time required to complete a project.
- Draw up a schedule starting with the "earliest" deadline. This will give you the minimum dates before which you won't be able to complete the various milestones.
How do you build a workload plan?
Tools for creating and managing a workload plan
The workload plan can be created and managed in a variety of ways, from a simple Excel file to more advanced project portfolio management (PPM) tools.
However, we recommend the use of project portfolio management software, as Excel quickly shows its limitations when managing large volumes of projects and data.
The limits of Excel workload management
The first reflex of project managers and PMOs is to look at " How do I make an Excel workload schedule?However, this solution has significant limitations when managing a large volume of projects:
- Obsolete information
- Calculation and data entry errors
- A poor decision-making tool
- Information limited to the scope of the project... what about activities that consume capacity?
Also, manually updating all the information in Excel can be time-consuming, and can lead to errors.
What's more, it's hard to keep track of changes made to multiple files, which can make project tracking more difficult. Not to mention the indispensable macros for securing and compiling data.
Excel is not a decision-making tool. The tool has not been designed to convey important information in real time, visually, simply... and on a large scale!
The benefits of PPM project management software
To manage your workload as effectively as possible, we recommend the use of project portfolio management software such as Project Monitor.
A high-performance software solution will enable you tocollect, consolidate and update all relevant data in real time, to help you make the best trade-offs or optimize allocations.
PMOs, resource managers and project managers have all the relevant information at their fingertips in an ergonomic workload plan. Reliable, comprehensive information to help them manage their resources with unrivalled precision.
Key benefits :
- Secure data entry with advanced rights management
- Reliable data entry with validation workflows.
- Remainder-to-be-done entry integrated with time spent entry
- Real-time data consolidation at project level
- Real-time data consolidation at portfolio level
- Monitoring the completeness of entries
- Management of all activities for a comprehensive, accurate view of capacity
- Modeling resource skills to help with allocation
- Generic resource management
- Availability calendar management including public holidays in all countries
- Allocation of resources to projects and activities
- Multiple visualizations via decision-support dashboards
In addition, PPM software is intuitive for global portfolio and project monitoring, including :
- Project progress tracking with Gantt charts
- Visualization of project portfolio health (risks, delays) with dashboards
- Project tracking and task management with Kanban
- Vision of dependencies between phases and milestones
- Budget monitoring and control
Before installing PPM software, Heppner's PMO had great difficulty managing the resources of its it supply chain projects:
"We had a tool to see past workloads, but we had no vision of the workload to be planned. We couldn'tfactualize and anticipate the workloadin relation to the projects to be carried out. We had a tendency to accept all projects despite warnings from the teams: we're not sure, but it's going to happen!"
Today, his first reflex when he has to decide on the launch of new projects is to log on to Project Monitor. Read the exclusive interview with Heppner's Group Projects Manager on resource management.
The same goes for the City and Metropolis of Chartres, which now runs its staffing committee from the availability dashboard at Project Monitor.
Discover PPM software Project Monitor to manage your resources
Manage the capacity of your resources to carry out the projects in your portfolio
Project Monitor is a resource and project portfolio management software. It offers native resource management functionalities, including workload planningscheduling time tracking and scheduling. Discover our simple, online PPM - Project Porfolio Management - tool, enabling you to plan, organize and manage the work of your teams from A to Z: budget, schedule, tasks, reporting.
With Projet Monitor you can :
- Manage your resources: Project Monitor allows you to define generic resources that represent a skill or a team, and then to itemize your workloads by named resource at schedule.
- Plan your workloads: For each resource, Project Monitor lets you define a target and plan the workload over time. Several planning strategies can then be adopted (macroscopic or detailed).
- Visualize your capacities: Project Monitor calculates the availability of each resource in real time, based on the planned workload for projects and non-project activities. Managers can then consult availability by criteria.
Example of functions for managing schedule with Project Monitor :
- Search and filter resources using various attributes and criteria, including skills, roles/occupations
- Color-coded indicators to quickly identify resources that are under-used or overloaded, whether during project execution or planning.
- Analysis of the ability to make grouped resources, categorizing them by role and defining a threshold to impose the inventory of investments, programs, projects or work items.
- Automatic or on-demand updating of the workload plan, based on times achieved and times remaining to be done, to give a realistic view of future workloads. You'll benefit from multi-granularity breadcrumbs and easier arbitrage/forecasting.
5 points to remember about planning
- Estimate the resources needed using charts
- Prefer macro-planning at the beginning of the project, focusing on the root of the project or by phases.
- Monitor resources during the implementation phase and refine planning accordingly
- Regularly measure the gap between forecasts and achievements to make the necessary decisions
- Conduct a retrospective analysis and draw the right conclusions
The project portfolio workload plan is a key strategic and operational element for aligning the organization's strategic objectives with resource capacities.
The project portfolio workload plan is a fundamental tool for efficient resource management and project planning. By providing an overview of workload, it enables you to arbitrate projects, manage demands and align the portfolio with the organization's strategic objectives. By using it optimally, you can make informed decisions and maximize your profitability and overall performance.
All our articles to help you take control of your resource management
Who allocates resources to the project?
What resources are needed to make a project a success?
How do you calculate a project's workload?
How to distribute the workload?