Resource & Workload Planner

What this planner answers

CM8-257 answers one question, and it is not "do we have enough people". It is: is Maria committed to 62 hours of work in a 37-hour week, and which project is going to find out last?

Every project plan in the building is individually reasonable. Each project manager asked for a sensible amount of a sensible person's time. Nobody added the requests together, because no single plan contains them all. This tool is the addition. You record one row per allocation — this person, on this project, in this period, for this many hours — and it totals each person across every project and compares the total with the hours that person actually has.

It is deliberately different from the two free planners it sits next to. The Manpower Planner asks whether headcount is sufficient for forecast demand, and the Production Capacity Planner asks whether machines and lines can produce the volume — both work in aggregate; this one works at the level of named people and named projects, so it can tell you who is over-committed, to whom, and by how many hours.

The row model

One row is one allocation: person × project × period. Somebody on three projects in one week is three rows. The same person next week is three more.

The period is whatever unit you plan in — a week, a month, a sprint — but it must be one consistent scheme, because rows are grouped by the exact text you type. "2027-W12" and "Week 12" become two different periods and the totals split silently between them. The period start date orders the periods and drives the date filter; enter the same date on every row of a period.

The capacity figure is repeated on each of a person's rows for a period. That looks like duplication, and it is deliberate: it keeps every row self-contained and readable. The tool never adds capacity up across a person's rows — it takes the largest value it finds for that person in that period, so three rows saying 37 give a capacity of 37, not 111.

Capacity that reflects reality

This is the number that decides whether the whole plan is worth anything, and it is the one most often entered wrong. Planned capacity is not contracted hours. Somebody on a 40-hour contract does not have 40 hours of project work in them. Before you write a capacity figure, take out:

• Absence — a pro-rated allowance for holiday, sickness and training. Over a year that is commonly 12–15% of contracted time before anything else happens.
• Standing commitments — the meetings that recur, the support rota, the line-management time, the daily stand-up, the mandatory training.
• The unplanned fraction — the breakdown, the customer complaint, the urgent quote. Every role has one and every role's holder can tell you roughly how big it is.

Then set the target utilisation against what is left. The default is 85%, and the setting exists precisely because planning to 100% guarantees a miss. At 100% planned, the plan is only correct if nothing at all goes wrong: no illness, no estimate that was optimistic, no rework, no question from another team. The first surprise consumes hours that were already spoken for, so the work does not simply run late — it displaces other work, which displaces other work again. A plan at 85% absorbs the first surprise and stays true. A plan at 100% is a plan that has already failed and has not been told yet.

The right target varies. Support and maintenance roles, where interruption is the job, plan far lower — 60% is not unusual. Long, predictable, single-project work can sustain 90%. What does not work anywhere is a target of 100% applied by a spreadsheet to people who are not machines.

Allocation, assignment, commitment

These three words get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing:

• An allocation is a planner's intention. It exists in this tool and nowhere else.
• An assignment is that intention communicated — the person knows the work is coming.
• A commitment is the person and their manager agreeing that the hours exist and will be spent on this.

The confirmed checkbox is the line between a plan and a promise. Leave it clear until you have actually spoken to the person and whoever else has a claim on their time. The unconfirmed tile counts the rows and the hours you have quietly assumed, and that number is usually the honest measure of how much of the plan is real. A plan that is 90% unconfirmed is a wish list with a date on it.

The distinction matters most at the point of over-allocation. If Maria is at 140% and a third of that has never been mentioned to her, you do not have a resourcing problem yet — you have a conversation you have not had. Have it before you escalate.

Fragmentation — the hidden cost

Three projects at 33% each is not the same as one project at 100%, and treating them as equivalent is one of the most expensive mistakes in planning. The arithmetic says both add to a full week. Reality adds three sets of meetings, three sets of email, three mental models to reload every time attention moves, and three project managers each entitled to an update.

The effect is well established even if the exact size is disputed: every additional concurrent project costs a slice of the person's productive time to switching. Split someone four ways and a meaningful part of their week is spent starting and stopping rather than doing. It never appears in a plan because nobody allocates hours to context switching.

The how each person is split chart shows this directly. A bar in one solid block is someone who can get into the work. A bar in five thin slivers is someone who will deliver less than the total suggests, no matter how competent they are. When you need to relieve pressure, taking a person's smallest allocation away often buys back more than the hours it removes.

Reading the load chart

The load chart is the point of the tool. One bar per person for the latest period, showing total allocated hours as a percentage of their capacity, sorted worst first:

• Red — above the over-allocation threshold. The commitments already made exceed the hours available. This will not resolve itself.
• Amber — above the target. Fully committed, no slack. Fine for a period; a problem as a steady state, because there is nothing left to absorb the next surprise.
• Blue — below the target. Room for more, or genuinely lighter work.

Read the bar text as well as the colour: it gives the hours, the capacity and the number of projects. Two people both at 95% are in different situations if one is on a single project and the other on four.

What to do about an over-allocation

When the chart shows red, there are exactly four responses:

1. Move the date. Shift work into a later period where the person has room. Cheapest when the deadline was internal, and most of them are.
2. Move the work. Give the allocation to somebody else — the load table shows who has spare hours. Costs handover time and sometimes quality.
3. Add people. Overtime, contract, agency, a new hire. Costs money, and on short timescales adds coordination load before it adds output.
4. Cut the scope. Decide something will not be done, and tell whoever was expecting it.

There is no fifth option. "Everyone will have to work smarter", "we'll absorb it", and silence are all the same choice: option four, taken by accident, with the scope selected at random by whichever project shouts loudest in week three. Pretending otherwise is precisely how projects slip — not in one visible decision, but in a series of small unmade ones.

Record what you decided in the notes on the row. Next quarter, when the same person is red again, the history of what you tried is worth more than the numbers.

Billable share

If you sell time — consultancy, engineering services, agency, contracting, professional practice — the billable share is the number the business runs on. It is the proportion of planned hours that a customer pays for, and it is not the same as utilisation. Somebody can be at 100% utilisation and 0% billable, which looks like a busy person and reads as an unprofitable one.

Tick billable on chargeable rows only. Internal projects, improvement work, training and administration stay clear. Watch the two figures together: utilisation tells you whether people have room, billable share tells you whether the work they are doing pays for them. Both climbing is growth. Utilisation climbing while billable share falls is internal work quietly eating the business.

The weekly planning conversation

The tool is built for a short recurring meeting, not an annual exercise:

1. Open the load chart for the coming period. Anything red is the agenda. For each one, pick from the four options above and write the decision down.
2. Work through the unconfirmed rows. Either confirm them with the person or delete them — an allocation nobody has agreed to is noise in every total on the page.
3. Look at the split chart for anyone on three or more projects and ask whether the smallest slice is worth what it costs.
4. Check the utilisation trend. One period above target is a busy week; four in a row is a structural problem that no amount of weekly re-planning will fix.
5. Roll the plan forward: copy the coming period's rows into the next one and adjust. Ten minutes.

FAQ

What if someone's capacity changes mid-period? Enter the capacity they actually have for that period, reduced accordingly. If they are away for half of it, halve the figure — that is exactly what planned capacity is meant to express.

Should I include holiday and absence as an allocation? No. Take it out of capacity instead. Allocations are work on projects; the capacity figure is what is left after everything that is not project work.

Can two people share one row? No — one row is one person. Two people on the same project in the same period are two rows, which is what lets the tool total each of them separately.

Why does the load table use the largest capacity rather than the average? Because the figure is meant to be identical on every row and the largest is the most robust to a row where it was left blank or half-entered. If the values genuinely differ, correct them — one person has one capacity per period.

Is over 100% ever acceptable? Briefly and knowingly, yes — a commissioning week, a go-live. As a plan for a quarter, no: it is a forecast of overtime, burnout and slippage in some proportion you have not chosen.

What if I plan in days, not hours? Use days consistently in both the allocated and capacity fields. The utilisation arithmetic is a ratio, so it works in any unit — as long as it is the same unit in both.

Saving your work

Allocations, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the allocations for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo. A workload plan names individuals and says how loaded they are, so treat exports as confidential personal information.

Accuracy & disclaimer

The arithmetic here is simple and the tool does it faithfully: it adds allocated hours per person per period and divides by the capacity you entered. Everything that matters sits underneath that. Whether the hour estimates are honest, whether the capacity figures reflect real availability, and whether the work nobody wrote down has been left out — the tool cannot see any of it, and all three change the answer.

The planner shows the arithmetic of commitments already made. It cannot create hours. An over-allocation it reports is not a defect in the calculation; it is a decision somebody has to take. This is a planning and record-keeping aid, not employment advice, not working-time compliance advice, and not a substitute for talking to the people whose weeks it describes.