Capacity & Resource Planning

The Agile Studio prefers to do less but with a big impact. It's not the kind of company that takes on dull projects just to boost numbers. Instead, it aims to build meaningful collaborative relationships that can stand the test of time.

To do a good job, create excellent products, and put a smile on both the client's and our own faces, two fundamental things are needed:

1. Putting the right people to work: A job title doesn't define a professional's full range of skills. For instance, in the design field, some are skilled in research, others excel in visual design, and some are great at process design. To ensure the success of a project, it's essential to involve individuals with the most suitable skills and attitudes.

2. Knowing who does what and how much: The secret to avoiding operational disasters is meticulous resource planning. At Moze, we carefully assess each team member's involvement in various projects. This management doesn't need to be excessively detailed (there's no need to plan every half-hour), but it shouldn't be too vague either. Good planning allows for an overview of ongoing and upcoming activities.

Effective capacity & resource planning for client work can make the difference between success and failure. A well-thought-out resource plan allows you to:

• Predict future workloads, offering a clear view of expected activities in the months ahead.
• Prevent overloads by anticipating situations where the team is overwhelmed, potentially delaying project completion.
• Plan internal projects or push new business activities during downtimes, i.e., to work on side initiatives or conduct research to improve processes further.

An agency may face a considerable workload at the start of its journey. The initial steps can be challenging, and this situation is often inescapable. However, overburdening people with excessive work can lead to two opposing effects. On one hand, people may become demotivated and leave the company; on the other hand, the quality of work can drop.

When we began, we encountered the same issue. We knew we couldn't continue to accept every project that came our way. We quickly reached a point where we had more ongoing projects than we could manage, and meanwhile, new requests were accumulating without us being able to provide a clear response to potential clients.

The solution was drastic: we stopped selling new projects for a while and instead focused on completing those already in progress. This decision, although bold from a business perspective, was essential. It allowed us to concentrate on closing existing projects while ensuring the satisfaction of our clients. From that point on, we realized that careful planning of team resources for production activities, a process also known as capacity planning, was crucial. We began tracking which team members worked on which projects, for how long, and with what dedication.

This simple yet effective practice, which we continuously refined over the years, completely transformed the situation. We could finally predict when we would complete ongoing projects, when we could start new ones, and how much individual activities were costing us.

Getting started with Capacity Planning

The easiest way to begin with capacity planning is to create a list of team members and mark the start and end dates of each project they are working on on a timeline. We started with a simple Google Sheets document.

Over the years, however, this sheet became longer and more complex, making it difficult to manage. While there are many software solutions for capacity Planning, none seemed as simple and immediate as we wanted (many of these tools are designed for companies with highly structured processes).

After some time, we developed Hellotime, an easier way to do capacity planning. Hellotime started as internal software and later became available to others. We hope it can help many teams like ours complete their projects on time and within the established budget.