Feature Request:
I propose adding a way to tag or indicate different kinds or types of allocations for Capacity Plans. Currently the only colour coding you can get with Allocations is based on the Project’s own color and this applies to ALL the allocations associated to that given project.
The Capacity Planning/Resourcing feature in Asana is super useful, but ever so slightly lacking in that there is no visual way to break up different kinds of allocations tied to the same project for the same user.
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A note on our setup:
We heavily use Estimated Times and Actual Time tracking at the task level to improve our Capacity Planning and Forecasting of workloads per users and teams in Asana. I will mention we utilize a lot of automations and API calls with a lot of custom work, but I can see how this feature request would be super helpful for organizations who may be creating and managing the Allocations that make up Capacity Planning, manually. In particular, if you want to visually see the kinds of work a user might be allocated across a project’s journey or lifetime, or even if a user is receiving a lot of a specific grouping of work.
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Current State:
Currently you can create allocations, and with the addition of the Custom Fields at the team-level, you can even group allocations into functional teams. However, when you use the Groups feature on a custom-field you lose the functionality to create additional allocations. This is regardless if you’re using the People or Projects views on Capacity Plans.
Because you can’t use groupings effectively when trying to create allocations manually, one thing that the allocations do not address is the different types of “work” a user might be allocated to for a given project. If an allocation is a group of work, it can easily be understood that you’d have multiple allocations for the same user on the same project. And I do understand the idea we could organize this at the project level using tasks, sections etc. but I specifically want the Capacity Plan view which is already super helpful to get that next step up for high-level overviews.
While it is insightful to see an overall workload for a single person or for a single project, it’d be super helpful if you could also create custom types of allocations.
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Example:
I am currently assigned and working on a brand new project for a new client which will consume 20hrs over 5 bus days. (Red allocation)
An old client contacts me and wants specific reworks of components of a previously completed project, this specifically includes 5hrs of 3d modeling and 3hours of implementation work, over 5 bus days concurrently.
In the current state of Capacity planning if we look at myself using the People view of a Capacity Plan:
- it will show that I have in total 28hrs of work spread out across the 5 business days
- 20hrs would be dedicated to the new project (red allocation)
- 8hrs would be dedicated to the old project (green allocations)
The issue:
You could enter 1 or 2 allocations for the 8hrs towards the old project. If you created 2 allocations, they simply stack on to of each other as in my example. There is no visual toggle or field reference available to show that one allocation on the same project is for specific types of work occurring over the same timeline besides them being separate allocations.
In other cases, you might only have the single allocation of Estimated Time for a given project, but you may not instantly recognize this is an allocation of brand new work, old work, updates, etc.
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A preface on my hack-job workaround below:
We have a unique setup to pull this off, we heavily rely on internal automations triggered by actions in Asana or run on a timed schedule to scrape custom fields across our Projects and their tasks to create and maintain allocations for capacity planning purposes. You could do this manually as I am for this one example, I already pray for your sanity 
, by toggling back and forth between Estimated Time and Percent allocation on your Capacity Plan so that you could manually create the percent and estimated time allocations via the Project view.
My hack-job-workaround while I dream of this feature being implemented:
Since we don’t care about percentages of work we expect our team to consume towards a project, since we are using Estimated Time values already. Let’s just use percentage allocations to represent different types of allocations.
- Create allocation pairings where an Estimate Time allocation has a paired Percentage allocation.
- Using our previous example:
- 5hrs of 3d modeling
- we’ll use 1% to represent 3d modeling allocations
- 3hrs of implementation
- we’ll use 2% to represent implementation allocations
- 5hrs of 3d modeling
Results: Not beautiful, but usable
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Example of how our setup looks with more advanced logic and pairings for a single team member with multiple projects:
Using our advanced concept above as an example:
- instead of having a percentage allocation to identify what type of work is associated with the Estimated Time allocation, we could colour code them or tag them with custom types
- creates an easy to use, visual representation of a given persons real-workload at a high level including the different kinds of work making up that project level workload.
- Give managers better oversight on where a given team member’s time is really going, not just at the overall project level, but also the overall amount of each type of work they’re being given.
- we wouldn’t need to maintain a hub+spoke setup where a single percentage allocation is related to several other allocations using scripting
Thank you if you made it to the end of this 