Hi Asana Community.
I’m Ben from Asana’s Product Marketing team, and I’m excited to announce our latest development in our resource management capabilities: capacity planning!
This new feature gives department heads and leaders the ability to create capacity plans that optimize resourcing decisions by visualizing staffing trends and highlighting hiring needs.
Asana users can now create capacity plans and allocate people to projects over longer time horizons. Unlike workload, which manages task assignments, this new view allows you to allocate individuals to entire projects and workstreams using percentages and estimated time, without requiring you to assign out tasks. This gives you a high-level summary of who’s working on what and if anyone’s over or under capacity.
How do capacity plans work?
Creating a capacity plan is simple and easy. Go to reporting on the left pane, and click “capacity plan” under the create menu.
The first step is adding individuals to your plan. You can search for anyone in your domain and add them to this view.
Next, you’re going to want to create project allocations by adding projects to the capacity plan. You can add any projects you have access to and create allocations for each individual. These allocations can be percentages (which is most common), estimated hours, or you can just rely on project counts to understand how people are staffed. These allocation capacities can all be manually adjusted in the effort dropdown menu.
As allocations are created, you’ll be able to understand where each team member is staffed and how much capacity they have left. You can create allocations for any time frame, which is especially helpful when you want to vary someone’s capacity. For example, I might want to staff someone 25% on a project this month but increase their capacity to 50% the next month. I would just create two separate allocations for that individual and adjust the value accordingly.
As you create allocations, they show up in a few other places in Asana. First, if you click on any project in a capacity plan, you’ll be able to see all members of your organization that have been allocated to that project. Additionally, you can see these allocations in any portfolio where that project lives.
While each capacity plan you create is private until you actively share it, capacity allocations on each individual can be seen by others if those individuals are part of other capacity plans.
For more in-depth details about how to use capacity plans in your organization, visit the Asana Guide.
This feature is available on our Asana Enterprise and Enterprise+ plans. If you are currently on a different plan, please contact our Sales team to learn more.
As always, we are excited to hear your thoughts and feedback! How does this help your organization with strategic planning? How else would you like to manage capacity in Asana?
Comment below and let us know how we can help you continue to drive teamwork and collaboration at your organization. Thanks!
