Managing Capacity

This article shows how to view and manage resource capacity on the Capacity page.

Overview

What is Capacity?

Resource capacity is the full-time equivalent amount of a resource dedicated to project work expressed as a decimal fraction of an FTE or as hours per period. The FTE method is constant regardless of period granularity; 1 FTE is 1 in year, quarter, or annual period granularity. The hours method varies with granularity; 40 hours per week will become 160 hours in some months and 184 hours in others.

[Note: For the sake of simplicity and consistency, we STRONGLY recommend that you NOT adjust capacity to account for overhead. If you set capacity at .7 or .8 FTE, you have to remember that a full time assignment to a project must also be .7 or .8. Furthermore overhead rates may be radically different in different organizations making a nightmare of supply demand analysis.]

Source of Capacity Values

Resource attributes including capacity can be entered manually or imported from a corporate HR system by a ResourceFirst interface. The most common method for larger organizations is by HR interface.

However there are many cases where manual creation of resources and entry of attributes is called for. See the article Adding and Maintaining Resources for how to create resources.

The Resource Capacity Page

When a resource is created, capacity is automatically set to 1 FTE from the current date forward.

To modify capacity, just enter the appropriate values on the Resource Capacity page.

[Note: At the request of some customers, it is possible to set capacity less than zero. Please do not do this unless you have a well-developed use case.]

You can use drag-fill and copy-paste in the period data grid on the Capacity page. See the article Data Entry in ResourceFirst.

Don’t forget to click Save in the upper right.

Note: When a resource is terminated, remember to zero their capacity beyond the Date Terminated to ensure ongoing correct historical reporting.