Do you have overburdened teams spread across too many projects? Do you see ad-hoc and internal work piling up and frustrated clients who wanted something yesterday? On the flip-side, perhaps you have too many people on the bench? Or are your team’s utilisation rates are low?

If either of these scenarios sounds familiar then you might want to think about capacity planning. In this article, we’ll help you find out whether everyone on your team is near a saturation point, and if you need to look further into integrating some tools and software to help your organisation build some capacity for team members. We also share some of our favourite tools to help your company and your team assess your hiring needs in real-time.

Stay up-to-date with our tips and insights, and receive them every month straight into your inbox:

Assessing the situation

Before investing in a new tool, you need to draw a clear picture of your current situation. This will help you assess your needs and that of your team. Take some time to see whether you can easily answer the key questions below, if you can’t then you will definitely need to look further into capacity planning tools.

• Do you have the bandwidth to take on new projects?
• What skills/ capabilities do you need to deliver – and what is missing from your current resource pool?
• Is every resource assigned to the right kind of work?
• Can existing resources be upskilled in these areas, or do you need to hire new people? 

What are capacity planning tools? 

Capacity planning software can help you here. There are various tools on the market that help companies evaluate their resource capacity needs to keep up with varying levels of supply & demand in the market – critical in a world getting used to various levels of lockdown. 

Our suggestions

VOGSY 

This Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution is specially built for Google Workspace, which allows all your teams to be connected in one place. It works as an integration and so is easy to put in place within an organisation as it works like any other everyday tool. 

Their resource management tool is especially useful for our concerns as you can track people’s availability and skills and assign tasks to the relevant team members in just a couple of clicks. All thanks to intelligent resource suggestions and automatic skill matching in your required time frame. This is as useful for next week’s tasks as for long-term forecasts as you can view people’s availability months in advance. 

Vogsy also allows you to create placeholders for future hires so you know what skills to hire and for how long. It’s a valuable resource if you use a lot of freelancers and contractors so that you can plan their projects as efficiently as possible.

ClickUp

This all-in-one app allows you to integrate all your tools into one place for more effective project management. It helps employees track their time worked on projects and update progress in real-time. 

This polyvalent tool helps you in every single aspect of your business, from HR to IT with helpful employee performance tracking and Agile workflow dashboards.

On their website, you can find a variety of examples of how you can use their tools, whether you lead a Sales team or are scaling your Startup. Especially in the latter case, this is an essential tool to have your team communicate effectively cross-functionally, even when working remotely while allowing the leadership to keep track of everyone’s work.

Wrike

This minimalistic software has dedicated tools to support professional services, creative industries, marketers and product specialists. It allows you to ensure perfect collaboration with all teams within your organisation and is easily customisable for early adoption from everyone.

You can take a thorough look at how long projects take from ideation to completion, and react accordingly. Equally important, you can quickly visualise everyone’s availability and efforts. You can also assign tasks to the right people thanks to precise activity tracking and the possibility for employees to request time off on the platform, for instance.

This software will make your life easier by providing your team and you with automatic workflows, and fully customisable dashboards and charts. That way, everyone can have crystal-clear visibility of team-wide efforts and spot capacity gaps in an instant.

Conclusion

With a clear picture in mind and the precious help of any of the tools above, you’ll be able to plan any hiring needs well ahead of time. Team members won’t need to run over their capacity for extended periods of time and new joiners will have time to their marks to understand your business. These tools are precious help when it comes to looking after your employees’ wellbeing and running your business as efficiently as possible.

Did you find out that you need new hires? Movemeon can help you with hiring high-calibre talent from top-tier strategy and management firms across a diverse range of functional and sector expertise. We specialise in partnering with organisations of all nature, from FTSE100 and PE/VC funds to early-stage startups, across a range of industries. We’re also global, with offices serving the UK, DACH, France and APAC. Click below to get in touch with us now to learn more about our offering and platform.