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What is workload planning? Definition
Workload planning (sometimes called workload management) is the systematic process of effectively managing, distributing and assigning tasks, responsibilities, and resources to the right team member within an organization or a specific project. Typically, workload planning is completed using a workload management tool or project management tools.
What is the goal of the workload management process?
Workload planning aims to ensure that project tasks are appropriately distributed, balancing the workload across individuals or teams to prevent overburdening or underutilizing resources. By considering factors such as task complexity, skill sets, existing team workload, and available capacity, workload planning aims to optimize productivity, promote collaboration, and enhance overall organizational performance.
Should effective workload management be long- or short-term?
For some companies and project managers, workload planning is all about seeing the tasks needed in the next few days to team members. However, workload planning is not task management, it's all about long-term perspective.
Workload planning is a process designed to help managers optimize the utilization of resources and team's workload while avoiding common problems, such as overbooking or schedule conflicts, consequently generating additional income. Such an approach prevents the company from being unprofitable at any point in time and ensures that highest priority tasks are completed on time - and you cannot achieve that result with short-term planning.
Workload planning step by step: key elements
Key elements of workload planning typically include:
Task analysis
Before you start assigning tasks for your project team, you need to establish what tasks or projects need some additional support from your employees. To do that, identify the specific project tasks required to accomplish project milestones, including their dependencies and priorities. If necessary, compare the operations' budget to see which one will be more profitable for you if completed on schedule. Project management software can help you do that!
Resource assessment
Don’t divide the team's workload into assignments yet! For effective workload management, a project manager needs to evaluate the available resources, such as personnel, equipment, and budget, to determine the capacity and constraints for carrying out the workload. At this stage, you can also spot any vacancies that must be filled before your project starts.
Workload distribution
Use the information you have acquired for allocating tasks and responsibilities among individuals or teams based on their expertise, availability, and workload capacity. This may involve assigning deadlines and setting clear expectations, as well as solving some schedule conflicts with other managers.
Whenever possible, also try to manage the employee bench in your company. The fewer specialists are idle, the less costs (and more profit) they generate!
Workload monitoring
Of course, workload planning does not end when you close the calendar with allocations. Tracking and reviewing the progress and status of assigned tasks to ensure they are being executed according to plan is yet another key to success of this operation, as this allows for timely adjustments and reallocation of resources if necessary.
Using tools such as a project progress report, or a simple time tracking, can prevent your project from falling behind or even failing altogether.
Benefits of workload planning
Workload planning (and workload management system in particular) offers several benefits to organizations and individuals involved in projects or daily operations and team workload management. Here are some key advantages:
- Resource optimization: By carefully using careful task management, project manager ensures that resources, such as team members, time, and equipment, are utilized efficiently.
- Enhanced productivity: This strategic allocation of work ensures that employees can focus on their areas of strength, resulting in increased productivity and improved output quality.
- Time and task management: Workload planning allows for effective time management by setting realistic deadlines, prioritizing tasks, and avoiding unnecessary delays. It helps individuals and teams stay organized and focused, reducing the risk of missed deadlines or rushed work.
- Proactive risk management: Through workload planning, potential bottlenecks or resource constraints can be identified and addressed early on to allocate tasks fairly without interfering with project planning later on.
- Adaptability and flexibility: Effective workload planning allows for flexibility in accommodating changes, unexpected events, or shifting priorities, creating a balanced workload. By regularly monitoring and reviewing workloads, adjustments can be made to ensure efficient allocations.
- Improved decision-making: With workload planning, managers and team leaders have a better understanding of resource availability, capacity, future workload, and dependencies.
Can workload planning be more intuitive?
Of course, it can - provided you use the right set of workload planning tools to provide an overview of team workload and an option to assign tasks to each team member.
For example, in Primetric's workload planning software, you can find the right people for the job in seconds and manage their capacity with 100% accuracy. Here’s what it looks like in practice!
Workload planning in Primetric's workload planning tool
Workload planning in Primetric starts with the allocation itself.
As you can see in the form below, after choosing the person with the skills your project needs, you can see all of their details, including their employee workload, capacity, hourly wages and current allocations. As shown in the picture, you will also be notified about any potential mistakes in your workload planning - in this case, the employee in question might be overbooked.
In this form, you can also manage workloads and the details of particular allocations. You can decide whether the work is billable or not billable, set the assignment as Active or Draft, and define the extend of the assignment (full-time or part-time). Should you have such a need, you can also add the details of the assignment that were not included in the form.
Of course, workload planning in Primetric does not end there.
After you have created an assignment for your employees, you can manage them in either People or Project calendar - whichever fits your purpose best.
In these views, you can drag and drop assignments, extend them, or cancel them altogether. You can also take a sneak peek on their details, such as budget or planned number of hours. As a result, you can fix any problems on the spot.
Don’t stop learning about workload planning!
Here are some resources you can use to expand your knowledge even more and ensure that your entire team knows how to prioritize tasks in complex projects:
- a complete guide to billable utilization and managing it,
- an overview of differences between short- and long-term planning,
- creating a resource utilization plan for project management,
- a good utilization rate - and what that really means,
- calculating team utilization - should you have no tool to do so,
or, if you still don’t have a tool that can help you facilitate all of these things, you can try something entirely different: book a demo with Primetric and see how we can help you with workload management process - and dozens of other thinks in your company!
