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In an Information Systems Department (CIO), steer the workload is a key issue. With an ever-increasing portfolio of projects, recurring maintenance activities and teams with a wide range of skills, the CIO needs to ensure that everyone is working on the right projects and tasks at the right time. The Capacity plan (or workload schedule) is an essential tool in this respect: it plans and tracks the allocation of human resources to the various Projects.
For CIOs, mastering the availability of Teams and their production capacity over time is essential to steer, anticipate and prioritize activity and mobilized resources. This kind of management not only helps to avoid overloading (or, on the contrary, underloading) Teams, but also to meet the company’s strategic challenges.
What’s the difference between Workload and Capacity planning?
The Capacity plan, also known as workload planning, is a short-term operational management tool for employees. It is used to check that team member assignments are in line with their capacity. A Workload plan is drawn up for the next 2-3 months. Managing a Workload plan beyond this period is usually quite a feat, since, with very few exceptions, changes in priorities, new Projects and other HR incidents can hardly be predicted.
In concrete terms, a Workload plan can be used to answer operational questions such as “Who’s working on which project this month?”, “What’s the Data/BI team’s workload?” or “What initiative could I launch given the Cyber team’s high availability?”.
In contrast, capacity planning looks further ahead, and more globally, at the CIO’s production capacity. It aims to estimate the medium- to long-term Skills requirements needed to execute future Projects, while guaranteeing the continuity of the Run.
In practice, this means checking 6-12 months ahead whether there will be a sufficient number of resources with the right Skills, in order to plan recruitment, training or outsourcing. Capacity planning enables you to compare profile requirements with existing capacity, aggregated by skills profile (man-day), and to anticipate bottlenecks or surplus capacity in the medium/long term.
Examples of use
- Workload plan (operational vision) – A department manager prepares a detailed schedule for his team for the coming quarter. For each activity, project and task (development, testing, support), he defines the nominative resources allocated. For example, he allocates 50 Angular developer days and 30 C# developer days according to Project needs, checking that staff are neither under-staffed nor over-staffed. The planning tool then indicates which collaborators are working on what each week, ensuring that the workload is managed and balanced as accurately as possible.
- Capacity planning (strategic vision) – The CIO analyzes his IT master plan and business forecasts over 1 to 3 years. He identifies that the arrival of new strategic Projects will require more “project manager” and “data engineer” profiles in 12 months’ time. Based on this vision, he decides to start recruiting and training immediately. For example, if all the projects in the portfolio require 3 FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) DevOps profiles within 6 months, capacity planning can be used to implement and justify a hiring or outsourcing plan.
Synthetic comparison table
| Criteria | Capacity plan (operational) | Capacity planning (strategic) |
|---|---|---|
| Time horizon | Short to medium-term (3 to 6 months) | Medium to long term (> 6 months) |
| Vision | Specific tasks and projects per person | Overall needs by profile and Budgets |
| Objective | Efficiently distribute the real workload among Teams | Anticipate future needs by profile to ensure capacity to achieve strategic objectives |
| Key questions | Who’s working on what? Are new requests coming in? | Will we have enough Skills tomorrow? Or unstaffed skills? What kind of hiring or training? |
| Main actors | Projects, PMO, Resources Managers | CIO, general management, PMO |
| Deliverables/ KPIs | Workload planning by person / Teams Capacity VS assignments | Tables (man-days, breakdown by profile type) Requirements VS capacity |
What are the challenges of the CIO’s Workload plan?
For a CIO, there are many benefits to be gained from properly managing the Capacity plan. First of all, it helps to identify staff availability and overload, and to adapt it to the needs of Projects and activities, while guaranteeing load balancing.
Secondly, this transparency facilitates decision-making: by showing in real time the actual number of employees mobilized, we can identify any bottlenecks or, on the contrary, unused capacity. The figures produced by the Workload plan serve as a tangible basis for arbitration, and for discussing priorities and the IT budget with management.
What’s more, a clear Workload plan increases the efficiency and commitment of each player: Teams know what they have to work on, which helps to avoid dispersion by setting a framework and objectives. At company level, this translates into a greater ability to work on the right issues at the right time.
Managing the Capacity plan also improves the CIO’s budgetary performance. By integrating the costs of Teams (internal and external) into Projects and Activities, you get a complete picture of the Budgets actually devoted to Projects or Activities. As we explain in our article , this opens up perspectives that go far beyond the strict control of CIO human Resources, and enables you to build a complete and exhaustive approach to CIO Budgets).
This budgetary transparency reassures General Management and the CFO, as it enables them to see the reality of the human resources mobilized and to assess their budgetary impact. The Workload plan is a way of showing (or justifying) the Projects or activities that are taking up Teams’ time. With precise KPIs, management can arbitrate to free up Teams’ time and prioritize actions.
Reconciling the Workload plan in real time with the CIO’s budget monitoring enables you toanticipate any deviations and adjust your financial steering on an ongoing basis.
Finally, and this is one of the major pains for any CIO, the Workload plan provides factual proof that Teams are fully occupied, on the right subjects, at the right time. It’s a vector of communication that increases the CIO’s transparency.
A legacy system, though imposing and sometimes complex, can be sufficiently well urbanized, documented and maintained not to constitute an IS liability – quite the contrary. On the other hand, if left unattended, legacy systems can quickly fall into debt, with significant damage as a result.
What governance for a Workload plan?
The success of the Capacity plan depends on the collaboration of the various players in the CIO. The PMO (Project Management Officer) plays a central role, identifying and compiling Skills requirements for all Projects and activities, refining estimates and ensuring overall balance. Project managers continuously feed back their needs for their own Projects, updating the Workload as they progress. As for team managers, they manage the capacity of their staff and assign the right team members to the right tasks.
To be effective, these players must be supported by clear processes. We recommend setting up a dedicated governance structure (Steering committee, Project portfolio reviews, assignment or staffing committees). For example, we ensure that a formal body validates priorities and arbitrates human resources conflicts. This management sponsorship legitimizes the approach and facilitates buy-in from Teams, a prerequisite for rigorous Capacity plan tracking.
NB: In the CIO, the Capacity plan is often distorted by forgetting to set aside time for maintenance (the “Run”). Staffing should be prioritized on the Run, then on Projects, while keeping a “free” bandwidth (5 to 10%) for staff. All too often, these best-practice Workload plans are neglected, which totally distorts the CIO’s real operational vision by overselling the CIO’s ability to deliver Projects.
What tools are available to monitor your Workload plan?
In practice, the CIO generally relies on a digital tool to steer its Capacity plan.
A dedicated software solution (Project portfolio software or PPM) will collect, consolidate and update in real time all Workload data from Projects and Run. An appropriate software tool can centralize, make reliable and continuously update all key information, to facilitate informed arbitration and improve staff allocation.
Indeed, trying to manage the CIO’s Workload with a simple Excel file quickly proves time-consuming and hazardous in an organization with several dozen employees. The disadvantages are numerous: rapidly obsolete data, risk of input or formula errors, lack of cross-functional visibility, dangerous simultaneous updates and the impossibility of making advanced simulations.
On the contrary, a dedicated tool generally offers visual Dashboards, alerts in the event of overload (when you’re “in the red”), and the ability to continuously monitor workload (via occupancy graphs per team, for example). You’ll also find planning, Kanban, Gantt and reporting functions for monitoring progress, project health and dependencies.
Key features of a good PPM tool include real-time consolidation of data by project/activity and by portfolio, recording of time spent (to reconcile planning and actual), management of Availability (absence management) and Skills calendars, and decision-support Dashboards.
In short, the CIO gains in efficiency: the Workload plan remains accessible to all players (PMO, project leaders, managers, employees), so as to have unique, centralized, reliable and up-to-date information to steer Teams and Projects with precision.
How do you monitor and steer continuously?
Capacity plan management is a dynamic process. Requirements are constantly changing (new projects, shifting priorities, staff departures, etc.), and the plan needs to be updated accordingly. A number of key KPIs need to be monitored on a regular basis: Teams’ occupancy rate, variances between forecast and actual, resource conflicts, etc. The CIO must monitor these KPIs and react accordingly: adjust assignments, place orders for external services, or renegotiate project milestones.
A few best practices for daily Tracking :
- Analyze variances: compare planned workload with actual workload each month. Identify late or early tasks and reallocate workload if necessary.
- Reassess priorities: if a more strategic project emerges, or if a delay compromises the deadline, reclassify the Projects by priority. The Workload plan can then be adjusted accordingly, even if this means slowing down some secondary Projects. But be careful not to give in to the temptation to reduce the Workload on the RUN without objectivity!
- Communicate with Teams: keep project leaders, managers and employees informed, to validate adjustments. Their feedback is essential to know if a schedule is tenable, if additional Resources are needed, or if a project needs to be relocated.
This continuous monitoring enables us to keep an overview of all CIO activities. By combining rigorous planning with real-time tracking, we can detect potential overloads or underloads at an early stage, and correct them before they impact on project deadlines, RUN quality or Teams’ motivation.
How do you combine Workload plan and Budgets?
The CIO’s Capacity plan is closely linked to financial planning. By integrating JxH requirements (internal and external) into the Workload plan, the CIO obtains a precise overview of actual Budgets by Project/Activity. This approach opens up perspectives that go far beyond the strict control of Resources: it enables the construction of a comprehensive approach to real Budgets for Projects/Activities.
In concrete terms, the information derived from the Workload plan is used as a basis for drawing up the Budget forecast by planning generic resources. This information can then be continuously compared with financial tracking data, giving the CIO a more agile and reactive capacity for forecasting.
This synchronization means that every time a new employee is assigned, the costs associated with the project/activity are updated. In this way, the CIO is able to present a fact-based Budgets, facilitating arbitration by the management committee. In short, effective Capacity plan management strengthens IT’s financial control and aligns operational planning with the company’s strategic objectives.
Summary
Although fully operational, effective management of the CIO’s Capacity plan is ultimately a tactical exercise that has a direct impact on corporate strategy. It requires a methodical approach, the right tools and close collaboration between the CIO, PMOs, Project Managers and Teams Managers.
By following the key stages – inventory of employees and their availability, skills modeling, collection of project/run requirements, allocation, tracking and adjustment – the CIO can align its operational planning with its actual capabilities.
Tools dedicated to the specific needs of the CIO (PPM, collaborative platforms, dashboards) are essential to guarantee reliable data and responsive steering.
Finally, a well-mastered Workload plan not only ensures the smooth execution of IT Projects, but also provides management with a clear view of the health of IT activities, from both an HR and a financial point of view.