This getting started article will help Project and Resource Managers to see resources’ capacity and planning using the Windows Budget & Capacity Planner with TDnext. The user must have the Projects/Workspaces and Resource Management application access in TDNext.
Overview
Windows Budget and Capacity Planner (WBCP) is a Windows application that helps portfolio managers plan their upcoming projects. The Capacity Planner 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 track changes to their schedules.
Features
- WBCP 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
The following are the recommended system requirements for a computer running the Windows Budget and Capacity Planner or Windows Plan Manager applications.
- Memory – At least 8GB of RAM
- CPU – At least 2 cores at 1GHz or faster
- Hard Drive Space – 200MB of free space
- Operating System – Windows 7 or newer
- .NET Version – 4.8
- Visual C++ Redistributable
To download and install Windows Budget and Capacity Planner:
- In TDNext, navigate to the Portfolio Planning application.
- Click the Budget and Capacity Planner link in the left navigation.
- In the Capacity Planner display window, click the Download button to download Setup.exe.
- Click Save File in the confirmation popup, then run Setup.exe to install and launch Windows Budget and Capacity Planner.
- Click the Options button, then enter the URL you use to access TDNext in the TDNext URL field.
- Review the Privacy Policy and select the Do not track usage checkbox if desired.
- Click the OK button.
You are now ready to run the Capacity Planner.
Once you start Windows Budget and Capacity Planner, you’ll need to run a report to pull data.
As the Capacity Planner could return a very large dataset, it caches data for five minutes on a combination of the current user's ID and each Run setting choice. This means that making changes 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.
- Sign into 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 will run 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.
Throughout the Windows Budget and Capacity Planner, you can click on a project or request’s 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.
The availability grid displays the capacity for all roles and resources, if the role has resources assigned to it. 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 on an individual row will filter 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.
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.
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 times the hours that are allocated in that month. A person’s bill rate overrides a role’s rate.
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 backwards 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 so you can see how certain actions would change your schedule. You can also check or uncheck projects or requests to see how cancelling 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 to TeamDynamix, so you should save them by printing them, exporting them, or taking a screenshot.
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 which fall between the run dates.
Rejected Project Requests
Rejected requests that meet the following criteria will appear:
- They have forecasted functional role schedules which fall between the run dates.
- The request moved past the ready for reporting step before being rejected.
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 forecasts or expense forecasts have some overlap with the dates for the Budget and Capacity Report.
Workspaces where the dates on the resource schedules have some overlap with the dates for the Budget and Capacity Report will appear.
The table below shows the differences in reports in the WBCP vs 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
Time Off and Days Off affect capacity planning calculations and reports to provide an accurate picture of capacity and availability. The following explains how the system works in this area.
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 for a workday, then their Availability will be calculated to be 2 hours for that day.
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 schedules 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 which is configured as an organizational day off. In this case, an entry is made into the timetable as usual, but an entry is not made 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 course of a 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 at the time 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 on that day.
On reports where schedules can be compared 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 which 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, with one exception: 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 which are made on organizational days off are excluded from the reporting table. The reason for this is that the report may show a user having 0 capacity on an organizational day off, 0 scheduled hours (since the time off entry doesn't make 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, actual hours would show as 0 instead of 8 in the example above, even though there are 8 hours of actual time off 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, the differences in calculations are harder to detect at the week and/or month level, with the granularity options which most of these types of reports provide. Breaking the calculations down to a day level, aids in communicating the mechanics of these calculations.
After allocating resources through a project plan, changes may not be immediately reflected in the Resource Allocation Report.
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 update your changes manually to reflect changes more quickly in resource allocation, navigate to the Management console in TDNext and 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 resource allocation will display.
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 projects requests that are already in that workflow. Therefore, you'll need to resubmit the project request into the workflow for the changes you made to the workflow to be 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.