Capacity in black and white - instead of gut feeling and Excel grids
Work-time models, absences, assignments and actual hours form one loop: you see over- and underload before it becomes a problem - from the individual to the portfolio.
The capacity loop
Work-time model minus absences: every person and every machine gets an effective capacity.
Why resource planning fails today
Rarely because of the people - mostly because the data never comes together.
Capacity lives in an Excel grid
Every department maintains its own. By the time you reconcile them, none is right - and nobody knows which one counts.
Double-booked, and nobody notices
The same people sit in several projects. What they carry in total is invisible to any single project plan.
Vacation surprises the plan
Absences live in the calendar, not in the capacity. The surprise arrives in the very week it's too late.
Actual hours end up nowhere
Time tracking runs apart from planning. Whether an estimate was ever right remains a guessing game.
Resource planning as a loop - in five stations
This is how work-time models, projects and time bookings become a picture everyone trusts: capacity in, demand against it, actuals back - all the way to the portfolio.
Every resource gets an honest capacity
The work-time model applies organisation-wide - individual models per person are possible, and company holidays are maintained once, centrally. Employees record absences in self-service, and effective capacity subtracts them automatically. Machines are planned too: with a daily capacity in hours and properties from the same skill taxonomy.
Effective capacity
Demand originates where planning happens - in the project
Assignments hang on the work package, in person-days with an optional time window. If the person isn't decided yet, plan with a generic skill pool (“software developer, 20 PD”) and staff concretely later. The availability check shows cross-project utilisation right at assignment time - overbooking is avoided before it happens.
Availability check on assignment: cross-project utilisation including absences - right in the dialog.
See overload, understand it, rebalance it
The organisation-wide utilisation matrix sets booked hours against effective capacity - for people and machines, by weeks or months, scaling to hundreds of employees. The “overbooked only” filter takes you straight to the bottlenecks, the drill-down to the single booking. Foreign projects stay masked: the hours count, the internals don't.
Actual time closes the loop
Your team books time straight onto cards, projects or work packages and submits the week as a timesheet - approval runs in one or two stages, optionally with auto-approval within tolerance limits. Actual effort on the work package comes from time tracking automatically: plan and actuals stand side by side, with no duplicate upkeep.
Actual effort comes from time tracking automatically - switchable instead of maintained twice.
Bottlenecks months in advance - not once the project runs
The allocation matrix sets demand against available load across all projects - per department, skill or organisational unit, month by month, in percent, person-days, hours or FTE. The PMO sees bottlenecks before the next project starts, and time reports with budget context roll up to portfolio level.
Balance per department (available − demand)
Available load = capacity minus absences × availability factor.
And scheduling stays connected: when container dates move in the Gantt, the assignments' time windows move with them automatically.
One loop, six modules - one data foundation
In WORKSPACE.PM, resource planning is not an add-on tool but the platform working in concert: capacity, demand and actuals share the same data.
Resources & time
Team organisation
Project management
Portfolio
AI & automation
One data foundation - plan and actuals connected
Assignments fill the matrix, absences reduce capacity, booked hours become actual effort. No second Excel world, no duplicate upkeep.
And who maintains all of this?
Resource planning only helps if it doesn't become a project of its own.
Utilisation emerges by itself
The matrix feeds on what happens anyway: assignments from project planning, absences from self-service, company holidays from one central place. Nobody fills in a second spreadsheet.
Transparency without glass employees
The personal time report shows everyone their own data only. And in the drill-down, foreign projects stay masked as “other project” - the capacity impact is visible, the project internals are not.
The system takes the routine off your hands
Book time by typing a sentence to the AI assistant if you like; managers approve up to 500 timesheets in one go - or automatically within defined tolerance limits. Utilisation data reaches your BI via the REST API.
Related use cases
Capacity is half the battle - this is what comes next.
Frequently asked questions about resource planning
What PMOs and team leads want to know before switching.
From the work itself: assignments from project planning provide the booked hours, and the work-time model plus absences yield the effective capacity. There is no second spreadsheet anyone would have to maintain in parallel.
Then you plan with a generic skill pool - say, “software developer, 20 person-days” - and staff it later with a concrete person or machine. The demand counts towards utilisation from the moment of planning, not only once staffed.
No. The personal time report only shows your own data, and in the matrix drill-down, bookings from projects someone may not read are masked as “other project”. The hours count towards utilisation - the project contents stay protected.
Employees record absences in self-service, or administration maintains them centrally; company holidays apply organisation-wide with a single entry. Part-time is modelled via the individual work-time model per person. Both flow into effective capacity automatically.
Yes. Machines are plannable capacity carriers with a daily capacity in hours and properties from the same taxonomy as people skills. For maintenance or decommissioning you deactivate a machine without losing data - it appears in the same utilisation matrix as your team.
Put your capacity on solid ground
Start for free: set up the work-time model, assign projects, see utilisation - and in 30 days you'll know whether it fits.