This getting started article will help Project and Resource Managers assess resources’ capacity and plan using the Budget and Capacity Planner with Work Management. The user must have access to the specific Project/Portfolio Planning application and Resource Management in Work Management.
Overview
The Budget and Capacity Planner (BCP) helps portfolio managers plan their upcoming projects. The Capacity Planner allows you to forecast project budgets and manage resource schedules by visualizing their availability, allocations, and allocation changes. It is used for planning purposes and does not track changes to their schedules.
There are two versions of the Budget and Capacity Planner available:
- The Web-based Budget and Capacity Planner is available in the Portfolio Planning application.
- Windows Budget and Capacity Planner (WBCP) is a Windows application that can be downloaded and run locally.
Features
- The BCP allows you to forecast project budgets and manage resources' schedules by visualizing their availability, allocations, and changes to their allocations. It is used for planning purposes and does not persist changes to their schedules.
Contents
To run a report to pull data:
- Navigate to Work Management > View Applications > Portfolio Planning > Budget and Capacity Planner
- Click the Open Budget and Capacity Planner button
- Click the Run Report button
- Configure the report options:
- Date Range – By default, the report is set for one year, starting with the current month. These dates can be adjusted, though the overall period cannot exceed 5 years, and the start month cannot be in the past.
- Employee Filtering – This controls whether the Capacity Planner will show data for employees, non-employees, or both.
- Include Projects/Workspaces in results – When selected, the report will include projects.
- Include Project Requests in Results – When selected, project requests will be included if they have passed the Ready for Reporting step in their workflow.
- Reset list of checked projects or requests – This applies only when re-running a report. If you checked or unchecked certain projects or requests, those selections will be reset to the default when you rerun the report.
- Reset any shifts you have made – This applies only when re-running a report. If you made any shifts as shown below, they will be reset.
- Choose whether to view the report as Hours or a Percentage.
- Click Run
Installation
For installation instructions for the Windows Budget and Capacity Planner, see the article Installing the Windows Budget and Capacity Planner.
Running a Report
Once you start Windows Budget and Capacity Planner, you’ll need to run a report to pull data.
Because the Capacity Planner can return a very large dataset, it caches data for 5 minutes using a combination of the current user's ID and each Run setting choice. This means that making changes and then rerunning the Capacity Planner won't necessarily reflect those changes right away.
To run a report in Windows Budget and Capacity Planner:
- Open the application on your computer.
- Sign in to the application, and you will enter the main menu.
- Click the Run Report button on the toolbar to bring up the Run Report window.
- Configure the report options:
- Date Range – By default, the report runs from the start of the current month to the end of the month in the following year. These dates can be adjusted, but the overall period cannot be longer than five years, and the start month cannot be in the past.
- Employee Filtering – This controls whether the Capacity Planner will show data for employees, non-employees, or both.
- Include Projects/Workspaces in results – When selected, the report will include projects.
- Include Project Requests in Results – When selected, project requests will be included if they have passed the Ready for Reporting step in their workflow.
- Reset list of checked projects or requests – This only applies when re-running a report. If you checked or unchecked certain projects or requests, this will reset those selections to the default when you rerun the report.
- Reset any shifts you have made – This only applies when re-running a report. If you made any shifts as shown below, this will reset them.
- Click the OK button to begin the data download.
- To create a new report, select Run icon and change your date range and select Ok for the new report criteria.
Viewing the Budget and Capacity Report
Throughout the Windows Budget and Capacity Planner, you can click on a project or request title or a person’s name to view additional details. For people, this includes an availability report that breaks down the details of that person’s assignments.
The application has a toolbar which controls how you interact with the generated report, with the following features:
- Run – Reopens the Run menu to run a new report or adjust settings.
- Refresh – Reloads the data from TeamDynamix without changing settings.
- Filter – Opens the Filter menu, where you can filter by Role, Account/Department, Type, Priority, Resource Pool, Reports To, Active/Inactive, and Score.
- Print – Prints the currently selected views.
- Export – Exports the currently selected views.
- Show – Allows you to choose which of the views should be displayed.
- Availability, Allocations, Budget, Changes – These are tables[is this what grid means? Are these report types, or views?]. These reports are further detailed below.
- Shift – Allows you to shift a row of the Allocations or Budget grid forward or backward by a month.
- All Roles – When you have filtered the report to a role or resource using the Availability grid, this removes the filter.
Availability Grid
The availability grid displays the capacity for all roles and resources, provided each role has resources assigned. Each data cell in this grid represents the remaining availability for that month, which is calculated by subtracting scheduled hours from that month’s capacity. Cells in red have schedules that exceed capacity, and cells in green have schedules that are under capacity. White cells have no schedule.
The All Roles feature is a summary of all roles in the report. The next level shows each role, and the lowest level shows the individual resources that have that primary role. Clicking an individual row filters the Allocations and Budget grids for items related to that role or resource.
In the Allocations and Budgets grids, you can select and deselect projects and requests, to control whether they should be included in the calculations for the Availability grid.
Allocations Grid
The Allocations grid displays the projects, workspaces, and project requests that are included in the report, along with the Score, Score %, Priority, Status, and Account/Department for those projects and requests. Each column shows that month’s allocated hours for the project or request, role, or resource.
The top level is a summary of all projects and workspaces or requests in the report. The next level lists the summary for an entire project, workspace, or request. Deselecting a row at this level will remove it from the availability grid and from the summary row above. The third level includes the specific roles that are included. Finally, for projects and workspaces only, the last level includes the specific named resources.
Budgets Grid
The Budgets grid displays the projects, workspaces, and requests in the report in a very similar format to the Allocations grid. It includes all the same rows and drilldown as the allocations grid, but also includes Expense Budgets with a rollup and is broken down by specific expense accounts. However, instead of listing the allocated hours for each cell, it lists the projected cost of the allocations. This is calculated as the person’s or role’s Bill Rate multiplied by the hours allocated in that month. A person’s bill rate overrides a role’s rate.
Changes Grid
The Changes grid works with the Shift feature to track the changes you have made in Windows Budget and Capacity Planner. Whenever you select a row at any level of the hierarchy in the Allocations or Budgets grid, you can use the Shift arrows to move that row and rows below it forward or backward by one month. These changes will be reflected in the Availability grid and in the rows further up the hierarchy in the Budgets and Allocations grids. This allows you to shift and adjust projects or parts of projects to see how certain actions would change your schedule. You can also check or uncheck projects or requests to see how canceling a project or accepting a request would affect resource scheduling and availability.
All changes made in the Allocations and Budget grid are logged in the Changes grid, so that you can have a log of what was changed. These changes are not saved in TeamDynamix, so you should save them by printing, exporting, or taking a screenshot.
Navigating the Budget and Capacity Grids
When working in the web-based version of the Budget and Capacity Planner, users can use the following methods to navigate the grids:
- Use the [Tab] key to navigate between areas of the page.
- When focused on one of the grids, use the [Arrow] keys to navigate within the grid.
- When focused on an expandable/collapsible item, use the [Enter] key to expand/collapse the item.
- When focused on a line in the Budgets or Allocations grid, use [Alt + Arrow] to shift the line left or right.
- Right-click a line in the Budgets or Allocations grid to select the shift action.
Requirements for Work Items to Appear in the Budget and Capacity Planner
Project Requests
Project requests that meet the following criteria will appear:
- The request must be past the ready for reporting step, as specified in the workflow details in the Admin application.
- There is at least one functional role estimate or expense forecast on the project request.
- The request must have forecasted functional role schedules between the specified Capacity Planner run dates.
Approved Project Requests
Approved requests will always appear in Capacity Planner if they have forecasted functional role schedules that fall between the run dates.
Rejected Project Requests
Rejected requests that meet the following criteria will appear:
- They have forecasted functional role schedules that fall between the run dates.
- The request moved past the ready for reporting step before being rejected.
Projects
Projects that meet the following criteria will appear:
- There is at least one functional role estimate or expense forecast on the project.
- The dates on the functional role and expense forecasts overlap with those of the Budget and Capacity Report.
Workspaces
Workspaces where the dates on the resource schedules overlap with the Budget and Capacity Report dates will appear.
Hours in Capacity Planner Versus TeamDynamix Reports
The table below shows the differences between reports in the Budget and Capacity Planner and TeamDynamix.
|
Feature
|
Capacity Planner
|
All TeamDynamix Reports*
|
|
Scheduled hours from deactivated users
|
Not included
|
Included
|
|
Scheduled hours after user end date
|
Not included
|
Included
|
*Includes Scheduled Hours
About Time Off, Days Off, and Capacity Planning
Time Off and Days Off affect capacity planning calculations and reports, providing an accurate picture of capacity and availability. The following explains how the system works in this area.
Availability Calculation Formula
Availability is calculated using the following formula: Availability = Capacity - Scheduled (measured in hours). Consider the following example to clarify the formula:
A person's typical capacity is 8 hours per workday. This is described as Capacity. If that person is scheduled for 6 hours on a project on a given workday, their Availability for that day will be calculated as 2 hours.
Time Off Entry
When a person enters time off on their timesheet, as with all time entries, an entry is made in the timetable. This allows the time to appear on the person's timesheet, and normally, a related entry is made in the schedules table. The entry into the schedule's table effectively reduces the person's availability. In this scenario, if a person's capacity for a workday is 8 and they enter 8 hours of time off on that day, their availability that day will be 0.
One important exception to this rule is when time off is entered on a day that is configured as an organizational day off. In this case, an entry is made in the timetable as usual, but not in the schedules table. This is because on days off, capacity is effectively 0. Adding a schedule entry to that day would bring the person's availability to a negative number, which is undesirable.
Another exception to this rule is when the time off time type is explicitly configured to not make a schedule entry. This is not the default behavior, but it can be configured in this manner from TDAdmin. When this option is set so that the time off time type does not make schedule entries, then time off entries never have corresponding entries in the schedules table. This is a forward-only setting, meaning this will not retroactively affect time off schedule entries when the setting is changed. This can be useful if you’d like to do capacity planning at a higher level by distributing the expected time off over the year. In this case, you would not need the time off entry to make a schedule entry, because you have already accounted for the time off, which will be entered by representing it as a general schedule.
It is also important to note that this decision is made when the time off entry is entered into the system. This means that if the organizational day off was not configured and a time off entry was made, the schedule entry would be made. Adding an organizational day off after time off entries have been made for a day will not remove existing schedule entries for that day.
Time Off and Schedule Reporting
For reports that compare schedules to actual hours, a special table is used, which is populated nightly by an automated job. This means that these types of reports can contain data that is not 100% accurate if changes have been made since the last time the job was run.
This special scheduled vs. actuals reporting table is populated with all schedules and all actual hours, except for time off on days off. When time off is entered on days off, we know that a schedule entry is not made, and so this is automatically not included in the reporting table. However, a time entry is always made, so any time off entries made on organizational days off are excluded from the reporting table. The reason for this is that the report may show a user with 0 capacity on an organizational day off, 0 scheduled hours (since the time-off entry doesn't create a schedule entry), but 8 actual hours (if the person entered 8 hours of time off on this day). As such, since these time entries are excluded, the actual hours would show as 0 instead of 8 in the example above, even though 8 hours of actual time off are entered on the organizational day off.
This article gives examples of capacity, schedules, and availability on a per-day basis. The system is not this granular: it stores these data points on a weekly basis. As a result, differences in calculations are harder to detect at the week and/or month levels with the granularity options most of these types of reports provide. Breaking the calculations down to a day level aids in communicating the mechanics of these calculations.
Gotchas & Pitfalls
After allocating resources through a project plan, changes may not be reflected in the Resource Allocation Report immediately.
When a project is set to manage resource allocation by project plan(s), additions, changes, and deletions of resources do not take effect immediately. The changes, therefore, do not show up in resource allocation reports. These changes are updated by TeamDynamix in batches every night.
To manually update your changes and reflect them more quickly in resource allocation, navigate to the Management console in Work Management, select the appropriate project Name link, then click the Resources tab. Click the Update Schedules button. This will apply any resource allocation changes. If you run a resource allocation report now, the correct allocation will be displayed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What’s the difference between Initial and New schedule?
A. Initial is the value based on a resource's schedule on the project or workspace. New is the value for that month after shifting a schedule forward or backward.
Q. What happens to my project requests in my workflow if my ready for reporting step changes?
A. Edits to the workflow don't go into effect for project requests that are already in that workflow. Therefore, you'll need to resubmit the project request to the workflow so the changes you made to it are enforced. This includes the Ready for Reporting step. If you change that step, it won't be reflected until that project request is reintroduced into the workflow.
Q. How is total capacity calculated?
A. Total capacity is based on the resources' primary functional roles. Assigning a person to a project or request as a secondary functional role will not add total capacity hours to that functional role in the report.