Capacity Planning

[WorkModeAngel]

Hi all,

Does anyone know of a tool out there to make capacity planning easy? Something that I can use to show current capacity levels say, for example, if I have a couple of people off sick and to slot in extra work required.

I only have a very manually produced capacity plan, set up by the person in my role before me, and it’s a faff on to do and not easily manipulated. We have serious capacity issues (yup, NHS) and I want something that is easy to use that’ll highlight the issues. We aren’t, due to regulatory requirements, meant to go over 80% capacity. We are probably running at 150% these days (including myself)!!

Anyone know of anything I could use?

Roughly how many people would you be planning for, and is it short term planning (like shift planning) or long term (like we need to hire 4 more people next year)?

About 20-30 people and it’s for both - short term for the everyday planning and long term to assess if we need to recruit more staff in the future.

My work recently introduced something that does this. To give context, it's for planning when to complete work for filing deadlines (tax). People input people's jobs and then it shows their availability in hours (so who can assist with something else).

It's called Dayshape. I will caveat that I imagine this software is paid for, so may not be what you are after! I imagine you could probably recreate something with an Excel spreadsheet, but it would require a lot of manual upkeep and depends on whether you have the time or not!

(Caveat- I know this software is used but I don't specifically use it as it's not for my team)