I find the process of working with both the capacity plan (for rough planning) and the workload (for more granular planning) not very intuitive. What I see in many client projects is a workflow that often looks something like this:
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A new project is created from a project template. The template already includes a) project roles and b) estimated times.
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During project creation it might not yet be clear which person will take on which role. Therefore, project roles are only partially or not at all assigned to actual users in this step.
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After the project was created, it can automatically be added to a capacity plan (via a portfolio), but there are no pre-set assignments. So, you have to look up assignees, roles and workload (estimated time) to create a corresponding allocation. For roles where it is not yet clear who will take them on, you create an allocation for a placeholder (e. g. for the project role “Developer” you create/select the placeholder “Developer” and assign the estimated workload).
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In a next step you go over each placeholder allocation and try to find an actual person with enough free capacity you can transfer it to (transfer the allocation from a placeholder to a user). Pro Tip: You can add views filtered by role to make this task more manageable.
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You then go back to the project and assign the tasks for each role (to be able to do this after the project was created, you need to add a custom field for the role, because the functionality of the project role from the template basically gets lost after creation, but thats another topic).
As you can see, this process is quite manual.
Nowadays, the default answer to this problem is probably “…but, AI can do the staffing for you.”. And I agree. AI Studio and/or AI Teammates are great tools for staffing projects based on workload and availability. However, I am not satisfied with this answer as I believe that before handing off a task to an automation or agent, I need to understand how it works and what pieces it involves.
My idea/suggestion is simply to close the gap between rough planning and granular planning (capacity plan and workload) by leveraging placeholders (which were introduced months ago).
Instead of allowing a user to freely create short-lived project roles in project templates, it would make much more sense to use placeholders instead.
The process when creating a project could still be the same: for each placeholder in the template, you can define user and thereby “replace” the placeholder with an actual user. Or you leave the placeholder, when you are not yet sure who will be the assignee eventually.
A next step could then be to automatically add the allocations in a capacity plan to a project based on either assignees or placeholders. A “rollup” per assignee or placeholder for a given field like estimated time or percent allocation is automatically added (as an allocation) to the project in the capacity plan.
This would make the whole process much more intuitive and less manual.
Replacing individual project roles per template with central placeholders (which can also be added to teams) would potentially also pave the way for further enhancements, like standardising project roles across project templates, or allowing for further automations in projects based on project roles (as already requested in this post).
I would love to hear feedback on this - well - product feedback/feature request. As I am still trying to wrap my head around what the product team thought about how we might use capacity plans.