How to initialize your teams' workload plan and manage capacity planning?

How to initialize your teams' workload plan and manage capacity planning?

Intrudction

Collaborator Management in Abraxio combined with Budget Management and Workload Planning give you advanced management tools.

Scheduling Collaborator workloads allows you to precisely manage Projects/Activities from Quotation to Staffing. Consumption management provides the tools you need to analyse and update forecasts.

For managers, it provides global visibility of their Collaborators' Activity and their Forecast. These elements enable them to take action, anticipate bottlenecks and exploit optimisation levers.


Finally, capacity planning provides a high level of control by enabling a real-time comparison between staffing requirements (MD (Man Day) budget for projects and activities) and the capacity to cover these requirements (number of days worked by Collaborators). These analyses can be carried out globally, for internal and/or external staff, and by profile (macro qualification of functions/skills). A short-term analysis (3 months) verifies the viability of planning; a medium- to long-term analysis establishes future recruitment or service reinforcement needs.

Abraxio offers the possibility of a global or partial implementation. It is therefore important to define your management objectives and set up the associated Configuration elements.

Define your management objectives

4 main management objectives can be achieved with Abraxio:
      

1. Analyse the time spent on ISD projects and activities

      

Objectives / Benefits
Management level Prerequisites and configuration items
  1. Record and analyse consumption
  2. Help update the budget forecast
  1. Monitoring of time spent / Monitoring of consumption in days/man
  1. Creation of collaborators and periods
  2. Assignment of employees
  3. Activate timesheets to enable Consumption to be entered either by validating timesheets or by performing a mass import.

From the Finance and Management modules, you can analyse consumption in time spent.

2. Analyse team workloads and requirements by Collaborator profile

      

Objectives / Benefits Management level Prerequisites and configuration items
  1. Manage the workload plan for projects and activities to plan and manage them
  2. Give employees visibility on their forecast costs
  3. Give managers visibility on their team's workload
  1. Management and allocation with or without valuation in €

  1. Profile creation: Configuration > Value list > Profiles

  2. Creation of generic resources (Project Manager, Developer, etc.)

  3. Collaborator configuration: profile + ADR (Average daily rate) if you want to value in €.

  4. Modify budget lines to include resources

  5. Quotation of budget lines

  6. Assigning collaborators


From the Management module, Workload view, you can analyse the workload by Collaborator.
From the Portfolio module, Workload Plan view, you can analyse the workload by Project or Activity.
Finally, by analysing Capacity planning in the Portfolios module, you can get a clear picture of requirements by profile type.

3. Manage team availability to identify possible understaffing or overstaffing

      

Objectives / Benefits Management level Prerequisites and configuration items

  1. Plan Collaborator workloads

  1. Availability management

  1. Management of assignments (previous point)

  2. Collaborator capacity configuration: number of days worked per month.


From the Management module, in the Workload Plan view, you can analyse the staffing of each Collaborator or of a particular team.
From the Portfolios module, you can identify any staffing problems for a given Project or Activity.
Using Capacity planning, you can measure whether your needs by profile match the capacity of your team.

4. Monitor your Collaborators' remuneration



Objectives / Benefits Management level Prerequisites and configuration items
  1. Integrate the actual salary of your Collaborators into your management budget
  1. Salary

  1. Configuration of internal Collaborators with activation of remuneration management and definition of monthly loaded salary.

  2. Authorisation to view remuneration items

This last feature enables you to monitor your Collaborator budget so that you don't double-count your collaborators' remuneration and their assignments valued in € on your Projects or Activities.

Implementation guide


To start implementing the new features, you need to have identified your Management objectives in the previous chapter.
The "Prerequisites and configuration items" column associated with the selected items will give you a checklist of the items you need to put in place.

Profil Creation

Configure the Profile value list. Choose a limited number of profiles. They must remain macro to facilitate their use in capacity planning.
Example :

 

Creation of generic quotation resources

These generic quotation resources will meet 2 objectives when associated with a budget line:

  1. Define the skill requirement in the form of the resource label and its Profile

  2. Define the Quotation chart with the definition of an ADR (Average daily rate). 

These generic resources are to be included in your catalogue of resources for Internal Profiles and External Services.

Example :


Creation of collaborators

From the Admin/Users module, you can perform a mass import from an Excel file containing all the Collaborator configuration elements.

From the Management module, you can create individual Collaborators or enhance the qualification of users to convert them into Collaborators.


Collaborator Configuration

From the Management module, on the Collaborator file, you must activate the desired level of Follow-up:

On the Configuration tab, by Management period, you can fill in the following information:

  1. Profile qualification

  2. Assignment management

  3. Remuneration Management



On the Timesheet tab, you can manage the activation of time recording:


      
Then, in the budget tab, fill in the desired elements: remuneration, days worked, assignment ADR (Average daily rate), etc.


Assignment management

At the level of each budget line (of Internal Profiles or External Services categories) in the Finance and Portfolios modules:

  1. the Qualification tab enables you to establish the Profile/Skill requirement by selecting a generic Quotation resource, as well as the standard ADR (Average daily rate) (ADR defined at resource level and which can be overloaded)

  2. the Budget tab allows you to establish the staffing requirement in MD (Man Day) and the Financial requirement in €.

  3. the Assignments tab lets you assign Collaborators and draw up their workload plan, showing availability and the remainder to be assigned.

    1. Reminder: depending on your management needs, load assignments are not necessarily required. However, if you do use this capability, it is important to monitor the balance line, which is the difference between the defined budget and the actual staffing.

In the Portfolios module, you have a specialised view for setting budgets and assigning Collaborators :

 

Time tracking

To initialise your timesheets, find the documentation by following this link.

Operation and management

Once in place, you have several views from which to analyse and take action :

  1. Management module, Workload Plan tab: analysis of the workload plan by Collaborator or by team
  2. Portfolios module, Workload Plan/Allocations tab: analysis of the overall workload plan for projects and activities
  3. Portfolios module, Workload plan/Capacity planning tab: analysis of needs vs. capacity by profile