Focus on Capacity: Making Digitalization Real

2016 State of Resource Management and Capacity Planning Benchmark Study

Use this simple and effective approach to gauge your team’s Capacity Planning and Resource Planning maturity. This will help you benchmark your organization with your peers; then you can use the study results to learn how to grow your maturity.

Definitions

Refer to these definitions as you assess your organization’s maturity:

Capacity Planning: The act of assessing resource availability during the project selection and prioritization process. This ensures that your organization has the capacity to take on investments at the right time and with the right resources.
Resource Management: The ongoing, tactical assignment of personnel to planned and unplanned activities, the selection and identification of resources by skill, type, cost center, and/or other categories, and the maintenance of resource data.

Maturity Ranking Descriptions

Survey participants were asked what level best describes the Capacity Planning or Resource Management Maturity Level for their organization. The following are descriptions that were provided in the survey. Level 1 is the lowest level of maturity to Level 5, the highest level of maturity.

Use these descriptions to assess your organization’s maturity level.

Capacity Planning Maturity Levels
Resource Management Maturity Levels

Level	Description
Level 1	No understanding of capacity or demand No process for visibility
Level 2	Visibility is limited and relies on ad-hoc processes Difficult to consolidate resource visibility across the groups / projects
Level 3	High-level visibility of how staff and contract resources align with demand Not a complete or repeatable process
Level 4	Effective planning process with visibility of role-level demand before work is committed Can balance organization-wide capacity against prioritized pipeline Still difficult to adapt to changes and reprioritize
Level 5	Our planning is continually monitored based on up-to-date capacity and demand data Can run scenarios to manage change and prioritization Can apply our most valuable resources to the highest-value projects

Level	Description
Level 1	Unable to view workload and activities from a resource perspective Basic understanding how resources are grouped by role (i.e. engineer, analyst)
Level 2	Track high-level deliverables or key milestones against a project Informally coordinate availability and assignment mostly by generic role, process is manual
Level 3	Project or phase-level named resource assignment and simple role-based planning Visibility into the projects each person is working on / percent time allocated, no roll-off dates Actual time completed captured, little on upcoming assignments
Level 4	Detailed project schedules with short-term named resource assignments Resource requests are at the role level Resource assignments are made at a task level for better visibility Global resource visibility, but difficult to adapt to changes and reprioritize Ability to select from low-cost resource pools/offshore resources
Level 5	Mature work and activity planning process. Detailed, task-level schedules, cost information Formal process to request and approve resources by role and skill, short/long term Adapt to change and iterate effectively Project managers ensure that resource assignments on projects are current and accurate, resources can provide feedback