5 best practices for workload planning

Juggling between availabilities, priority projects, individual skills... Allocating resources within a company is a colossal task.

This is where workload planning comes in. It allows you to organize resources as an effective productivity booster. It's all about finding the perfect balance between financial funds, technological tools and employee availability.

The aim is to deliver quality, while respecting costs and deadlines. In this article, discover a 6-step checklist for planning your company's workload. 

Know your resources inside out

Take history into account

A study of the existing situation is the first step in designing a load plan.

Use the available data to establish a realistic vision of activity, starting with a study of who has worked on what over the past few months. This will give you a clear idea of the time required and the skills available.

A retrospective of previous projects will help you to identify strengths and weaknesses, so that you can plan your workload accordingly.

Tracking time with a dedicated tool

Time tracking involves measuring the time it takes your employees to complete a specific task. Specific tools can help you in this process. Stafiz offers a time tracking functionality. Everything is centralized on a single platform.

Ergonomically designed to facilitate team coordination, even at remote sites.

Time recording with Stafiz

Map your teams' strengths

With the help of your management teams, you can map all the skills and capabilities of your resources. This will enable you to select the most relevant profiles for each project. To find out more, consult this resource management guide.

To identify your strengths and weaknesses, we recommend that you draw up a resource plan listing : 

• all your resources: human, financial, technical and physical;
  
• all the activities you need to improve your business and productivity.

The inventory of fixtures and fittings is essential to the design of a workload plan. This step helps to establish precisely what already exists, so as to estimate the costs and price of the project as well as the type of invoicing to be used.

It also helps to highlight the profiles to be selected for a project, those to be trained and those to be recruited.

Resource allocation: think global, agile and committed

Think global

• Organizing resources

Resource allocation must be managed in line with the company's strategic objectives. 

However, it's not uncommon for certain resources to be disputed between different teams.

As a result, you need a global vision, specifically based on the project portfolio. Teams need to work together to plan resources intelligently across projects.

• Using a matching tool

You can use a dedicated tool to optimize your resource management.

Stafiz features a needs management module as well as a matching tool to help you identify the most suitable profiles for each project.

Think agile

• Flexibility

Flexibility is a key element for a good resource allocation. Project and company plans are often subject to change. Resources need to be adjusted regularly, according to portfolio priorities and business constraints.

The same is true at project level.

Why manage your projects with Stafiz?

Get visibility on your performance for every project in your portfolio.

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• Short-term vision

A one-year vision is no longer as relevant as it used to be. Today, short-term planning, 3 or 6 months ahead, can offer greater reactivity.

Indeed, the project is likely to undergo a number of changes: changes in teams, strategy or objectives, all of which require rapid decision-making.

• Agile method

This is where the agile method comes into its own, especially in fast-moving fields. Based on intensive development phases, it offers great flexibility and responsiveness. 

Think "employee commitment"

Giving your employees the opportunity to work on projects that motivate them and give them access to new skills helps to keep them more engaged. It's in your interest to avoid disengagement and talent drain. This hampers productivity and complicates recruitment.

• Gathering opinions

Gaining the trust of your teams takes time and listening. Spend time with your staff to find out what they need: organize team and individual meetings.

You need to implement appropriate support methods, such as skills tracking, appraisals and, more generally, a feedback culture. These encourage transparency and enable constructive progress.

• Use the right tools

Tools can help in this process. Stafiz enables employees to play an active role in their resource planning by providing a dedicated field in which they can declare their skills and career objectives.

Project managers have access to this data and can use it to build teams strategically. 

Anticipate resource requirements

Your business success and customer satisfaction will depend on your ability to meet your customers' demands and challenges. As a service company, your resources are the heart of your reactor: anticipate them.

On one side of the equation, you have your incoming projects with a high probability of being signed, and on the other side, your existing resources, whether internal or external. Putting these two elements into perspective is known as capacity planning.

To anticipate your resources, connect your CRM to your planning tool, such as Stafiz (which integrates a CRM-style opportunity management module and an open API).

Integrate financial considerations into your planning

In addition to purely resource planning and HR indicators - such as utilization rate or employee commitment, with eNPS - but also productivity, with time and task tracking, it is important to monitor financial aspects in an integrated way. The result is sound management that combines operational and financial performance.

Resource planning tools like Stafiz will help you save time. Unlike traditional tools such as roadmaps or Gantt charts, Stafiz centralizes all the indicators you need for real-time and forward planning.

Before the projects

Anticipating costs is a good first step, but anticipating margins is even better! So you can make the best decisions in terms of load planning.

Stafiz uses AI to work out various scenarios for you, based on your various "needs" (taking into account skills, competencies, availability), as described above, and enabling you to visualize the various financial impacts.

During projects: monitoring detour

Stafiz provides you with a predictive view, at project completion, and alerts to anticipate deviations before they occur, for fixed-price projects (but also on a contract basis). All indicators are automatically recalculated, so you always have an up-to-date view of all your projects.

Stafiz manages the ADR and CJM aspects, so you can plan your staff not just in terms of number of days, but also in terms of value. For example, you can decide to replace a senior member of staff with two juniors.

The "project progress" function allows you to organize your resource planning with an eye to financial planning. This enables you to identify when overruns are likely to occur, so you can take corrective action.

Standardize processes

Determine methods

Establishing a workload plan implies a certain uniformity within the company. 

However, teams sometimes use different criteria to organize project budgets(allocation of tasks, number of days, roles, etc.). 

It's vital to find the right balance between methods that teams are comfortable with, and methods that remain standard throughout the company.

Data must be measurable and comparable to assess the impact of resource allocation. 

Identify patterns and create templates

Over time, you'll identify repetitive patterns in the allocation of your resources.

The more information you have, the more you can automate and save time. In this way, your projects - and in particular the costing part, thanks to templates - will help you improve your productivity. 

This means analyzing how your teams work, structuring the company and being clear about the company's strategic objectives. 

Drawing up a workload plan can be tedious work. Studying historical data, tracking time and anticipating needs are essential steps in organizing workload distribution.

This requires a good knowledge of the company. Resource planning tools such as Stafiz can facilitate this introspection. The workload plan will not only improve team satisfaction, but also save time, generating productivity and profitability gains.