Resource Capacity Planning

Although this may already be on the roadmap, I want to reiterate the immediate need for this.

Allocating Time and the Informative Feeback Loop
Being able to assign an amount of time to a task (and a project) which actually connects with the capacity of the people they are being assigned to would have an enormous impact on efficiency and clarity in my (any) organisation. This would mean there would be a concrete feedback loop between those doing the work, blocking out their days in daily and weekly calendar views (see Timely app) and those who are planning in the new timeline view.

Availability and Context Blocking
This would logically lead (in my mind) to allow people to have granular control over their capacity; the amount of time they are available, including ‘context blocking’ which would give them control over what kind of work they are available for at any given time.

How big is a task?
I keep seeing that by default that a task should take about a week.

Any longer and it may need to be broken down into small pieces; I think Asana is reinforcing this, as when creating a task in the timeline view it is automatically laid out as 5 days long. But what does this actually mean practically; does this mean that a task should take roughly 35 to 40 hours? If this is the case I would expect that if I have been assigned 4 of these tasks simultaneously that they would need to be drawn out (visually) on the timeline over 4 weeks to be viable to achieve. I’ve seen this attempted in Jira and it Portfolio Planner, but we need something that is seamless and easily adopted, as well as being natively built in.

I would like tasks to behave like they have mass; that they will let you know when there is no-one there to pick them up.

This would be amazing, please make this happen!

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This would be perfect for us. Especially when you are an internet agency with different clients and projects!

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This is something I’ve been trying to figure out to do through Asana for a while. So far the best I’ve managed is to assign each resource a sub-task and hours using after the sub-task name to indicate effort. then using https://instagantt.com/ to set dependancies, dates and view workload.

I couldn’t agree more with @asherterpstra. This would take Asana to the next level. It could be so much more than just a task manager.

Thank you for that tip @Peter_Zakrzewski_NCG. My company has been researching capacity planning tool integrations for Asana over the last few months. Question - do you have to do a lot of double work with the Asana + Instagantt integration?

I hate double handing. With Asana/Instagantt there isn’t any. It’s the one dataset synced between the two apps. I either update and adjust in Asana or Instagantt depending on where it’s easiest too. I usually create the tasks and maybe assign them in Asana then add start/end dates and dependancies in Instagantt. Most data can be entered in both Asana and Instagantt.

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Hi Gianna, have you found any suitable capacity planning integrations for Asana? We similarly have a great need for this

Hi Pablo,

Unfortunately, no. Our necessity for finding a very detailed capacity planning method and high-level analytics/reporting wound up outweighing our desire to stay on Asana so we moved to Mavenlink. It’s definitely not as customizable or as easy to use as Asana, but we’re hoping we can get to a place where the resource planning functionalities justify the switch. I will say the closest we got to finding an integration was with 10,000 Feet, but our dev team wouldn’t have been able to take on all the additional work that using the open API would have required.