How do you forecast capacity and workload for pending projects?

I’d like to ask the community what their process is for workload and capacity planning, especially on work that is getting to the end of the sales funnel

We use Wrike mainly to manage current projects and track milestones and billing.

One thing we don’t use to its full capacity (pun intended) is the Workload feature as I find it becomes really complicated to forecast the workload for the projects in the funnel

We plan out several months’ worth of tasks at a time for our dozen or so staff

When a project gets to a certain point, we build a project framework in a “Pending” folder in Wrike so we can start looking at the timelines and a rough idea of the number of hours and staff needed.

The challenge is that something in the funnel will go from estimate to kick off very quickly and it would be great to have a view of best case / worst case scenarios if work hits.

How do others plot out work like this for their staff? Thanks for your feedback!

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Thank you for bringing it up Jeffrey Veffer! I hope that our Community members would be able to advise you. 

Our Product team is also researching how to improve capacity planning in Wrike, by the way 🙂

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Hi Jeffrey Veffer, I haven't explored it fully yet but there is a bookings functionality available in accounts with Wrike Resource and Wrike for Professional Services. Read more about it here: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500000601601-Bookings

I'm yet to use the functionality myself but hope this helps.

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Hi Liam McGuigan - thanks for the comment - we are looking at the Bookings functionality, but from what I understand, it is more intended for individual projects than Capacity planning at the portfolio level.  

Perhaps Lisa would know more?

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Hey Jeffrey Veffer! I'm going to ask your account's Customer Success Manager to reach out to you to discuss this 👍 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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I see many of these comments are historical. Has anyone leveraged wrike successfully for capacity planning? If so - would you be willing to discuss your findings and approach? 

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Hi Lori Jan

We had a call with the Product team back in 2021 and it seemed like they were working on something for capacity, but I have not heard anything for quite a while.

Basically we would like to use a 'draft' mode where we can try assigning backlog (upcoming) tasks to a resource *without* it actually assigning the work. That way we can see the impact to their current and future workload and balance the assignments. 

But not sure if Lisa could update on anything in progress?

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Hey folks! A recent update on this topic has been the ability to manage daily capacity in work schedules

Lori Jan I've asked your Customer Success manager to reach out to you about this and see how they can help 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Thanks, Lisa. I was able to set the schedules. Now I just have to figure out how to marry them up to the work required time. 

 

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