Bottom up resource planning

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:light_bulb: Tip: When posting a question in the Asana Forum, please try to include:

  1. I wanted to use Asana to plan out resources that I do not have and to use Asana for Business case validation. I have found out that assigning placeholder resources in the project capacity plan does not allow me to assign these draft resource to actual tasks to ascertain total resource usage.
  2. Created resources in capacity planner but cant use them oat task level. All I can do is guess the total project % capacity might be for these resources without giving clear workload details in Asana.
  3. Asana AI has confirmed that this a product gap. Honestly, that’s a fair comparison for bottom-up resource planning. Based on what the Asana documentation covers, Asana’s capacity planning is designed for top-down, project-level allocation rather than task-level resource calculation.

It looks as though MSP project or Planner maybe the only solution to my problem.

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Hi @Maurice_Ferris Totally hear you. Asana’s Capacity Planning is currently designed for top-down planning, so placeholder resources can’t be assigned to tasks, which limits task-level forecasting and business case validation.

Here are a few ways teams manage this today:

  • Task-level estimates + Workload by effort: Create a numeric custom field such as Effort (hours or points), estimate each task, and use Workload to visualize capacity for actual assignees using that field. This becomes especially useful once you’re ready to map work to real people.
  • Plan with roles using a custom field: Add a People or single-select custom field for roles (e.g., Designer, Engineer, Analyst), keep tasks unassigned while scoping, and use Dashboards to total effort by role. While it’s not the same as assigning placeholder resources, it gives you a bottom-up estimate you can compare against Portfolio-level capacity planning.
  • Portfolio + Dashboard combo: Use Portfolio Capacity Planning for your high-level allocation view, then pair it with Dashboard charts that summarize effort by role or project to help validate business case assumptions.

Here’s a quick guide on Workload and effort-based planning: https://asana.com/guide/help/premium/workload

That said, this is great product feedback, and you can upvote this in our Product Feedback area here: Product Feedback - Asana Forum