Why is capacity important

What is your capacity for success? The fact is that someone has to pay for whatever capacity is used, and that will be you. Even worse, your consumption might be untracked and growing continually. The real truth is that you need capacity management tools even more when your resources are so fluid and provided on-demand.

The truth is that you might just find that your business services have an infinite capacity to use more! Capacity management has been used for decades to optimize on-premise resources. Now, as cloud environments transform IT, it is being extended to enable holistic planning, management, and optimization of all your resources in one place and at the same time. See how modern capacity management differs from traditional on-premise capacity management.

This is the way that modern capacity management is practiced and is complimentary to cutting edge practices. In all enterprises of any size there will be key business services that are cross-platform and possibly leverage hybrid cloud architectures. These complex alignments of infrastructure — and the transactions that pass through them — need to be thought of as the single entity that they really are from a business and end-user perspective.

Key to your success is to know the capacity of these interconnected pieces to sustain transaction growth. The organization needs to determine its capacity requirements before it starts it operations. Like the skills needed by the workforce, no of workforce required, etc. Every business, whether it is small or big, is required to do capacity planning.

It brings in connection between the decision making power and the analysis of the decisions made for running the organization. Efficient capacity planning can turn any organization into a profit making organization. For instance, in a shopping mall, the manager should make sure that there is enough capacity of cash registers and cashiers to meet the check out demand of the customers.

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Either can be used depending on how ambitious your organization is and the number of projects you're willing to take on. A lead strategy is most often used in growing agencies. It envisions that you're going to be filling your project pipeline quickly. The lead strategy is aggressive. It predicts whether your agency will have more projects than you currently do or have in the past , which requires you to hire more staff so you can take on more work.

If those extra projects never materialize, your business will have made a large investment in excess capacity that you don't need. The lag strategy happens when your organization works its staff at full capacity or worse, over-capacity because you didn't predict and plan for an influx of projects. For one, your agency is at risk of overworking your team, risking burnout, and late project deliveries.

The match strategy takes into account your agency's current capabilities while keeping one eye on the future. It tracks your capacity and resource utilization , and gives the option to increase your capacity when you hit a resource ceiling. If the work is there, you can comfortably accept it and be confident that your agency can get it done. With most projects running for 2 to 3 weeks, and new work always coming in, we needed a robust tool that can give us an accurate view of our capacity to schedule and reassign work to whoever is the best available at that time.

Here are three real-world examples to inspire your own capacity management. After adopting Float, work processes sped up and project resourcing was simplified. Then Zeis and the post-production team coordinators assess the timeline and start resource planning using Float.

Social Chain is a creative agency with team members all over the world. Without capacity planning, the Social Chain team relied on email chains—and often double-booked their employees on the same project.

Head of Design Jamie Bryan explains:. One morning we found ourselves both working on the same project, without realizing another team member was already onto it! That was when we realized we needed an organized solution to help manage our schedule and balance our workload. Social Chain switched from outdated email threads to Float. Marketing agency Impression found that out the hard way, as founder Charlie Hartley explains:.

After the leadership team requested a breakdown of non-billable and billable hours, the Impression team noticed huge discrepancies between the actual data and that recorded in their project management tools.

So, they switched to Float—a capacity planning tool that helps Impression with forecasting. To leverage the power of capacity planning, you need to build a process. Before you can begin the capacity planning process, you need to know exactly what you're planning for. A detailed outline of what your company needs to get done—not only now, but in the future—is essential. Take a look at what projects are in your pipeline and coming up over a given time frame.

We recommend the next three to six months. Then, outline how long each task will take by breaking each project down into single tasks and estimating their length. How many days to execute it and the resources required for it. Will the plan adequately meet our client's needs? Next, run the outline past your team. They're the ones doing the work, and can tell you if your outline is accurate or not.

The best way is to strike a balance in the profit margins and your team resources; and this is the area where we can see the importance of capacity planning. Resource capacity planning presents a clear view of the amount of work a team can deliver without being over pressurized and maintaining the quality.

It's not possible for most agencies to hire a dedicated person for capacity planning or capacity management. This is where capacity planning software come into play. If you have planned well in terms of all three types of capacity planning, thenyou can rest assuredthat you would have enoughof three key resources in the long- and short-term.

The main three strategies that any business can use for expanding their capacity of capacity planning are as follows:. Besides these three strategies for expanding capacity or capacity planning, many organizations follow adjustment and dynamic strategies too. In Adjustment Strategy, they either reduce or addto the capacity in small amounts as per the prevalent consumer demand. However, Dynamic Strategy is a lot more secure and forecast-driven as here, a business adds capacitybased on actual demand and sales forecast figures, a little before it is required.

If you want to develop your project plans and resource schedules more accurately, then capacity planning and capacity management are imperative. The key benefit of resource capacity planning is that it ensures you have resources or team members who have the right skills as required. As a project manager , you should keep your team occupied and fully utilized but not over-utilized , and that's where team capacity planning and tracking employee capacity helps.

It also helps in enhancing project efficiency for an agency and simplifying the process of planning for future.