If you're struggling to work out where to assign either infrastructure or people resources, whether you have the capacity to take on new projects and clients, or you just want to track how much time you're investing on everyday tasks, it's probably time you look into capacity-planning tools.
Capacity planning tools come in all shapes and sizes. They exist for monitoring both your staff and infrastructure resources to work out whether you have the capacity to get the job done either if you win a new client or you have a spike in data traffic.
If you just want to see what you're spending time on and whether you have any capacity for extra work, you can look into simple tools that are limited in functionality. However, if you need to predict the resources you're likely to need in future, you can opt for one that will use AI and machine learning to predict what's likely to happen.
We've rounded up a range of different tools for you to help you try and find the best capacity planning tool for you.
People Capacity Planning Tools
Resource Guru
Resource Guru features an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface to add or move bookings and meetings, or add in staff attendance, including sick days, holidays or any other leave staff may have booked off or requested.
Each employee has access to their own dashboard that provides information about the jobs they have booked in so they can see instantly what they need to be working on at any given time.
Filters allow you to view only certain types of tasks so you can easily see whether you're lacking resources in a certain area and so can recruit if necessary.
Price: From $2.50/user/month
10,000ft plans
10,000ft plans is a visual planning tool that helps you see quickly where you're lacking resources. You can manage timelines and budgets and quickly see who's working on what, where you're missing out on resources, and how you can re-assign people to make sure everything is covered.
You can also see who's overworked, allowing you to identify problems before they happen, such as the need to recruit more staff.
Each person in the organisation can see their personalised dashboard with priorities and tasks. They can track how long they're spending on each project and how they can free up time, submitting timesheets for approval.
You can generate reports from the easy-to-use interface and, because everything happens in real time, it gives you a precise overview of the state of your projects and entire organisation, presented in a way that everyone understands.
Price: From $10/user/month
Saviom Resource Planning
Saviom Resource Planning has been developed to give different people in the organisation a view of the business' current position and whether it's prepared for a shift in future.
It can model views based upon the PMO, HR and Finance teams to ensure they can see only the information they need access to, making the insights more relevant than some of the broader software choices.
The easy to understand dashboard presents predicted resource surpluses and shortfalls from one place, so managers can re-assign resources where they're needed to make it as efficient as possible and avoid the panic if extra resources are needed at the last moment.
Price: On request
Infrastructure Capacity Planning
TeamQuest
TeamQuest offers a variety of tools to help businesses plan their resources, ensuring if there's an outage, they're covered without any downtime affecting business operations.
Vityl Advisor helps businesses understand the health and risk of IT and business services, using data to work out how equipped your business is when problems pop up. You can see quickly the health of your business from the dashboard to make sure you have the right resources assigned to the right parts of your business for the now and the future.
If you want more detail about the resources you're more likely to need in the future, TeamQuest's Predictor uses algorithms developed by the firm to predict the resources you'll need in the future, with suggestions of how to meet capacity without stretching budgets.
Price: On request
Idera Infrastructure Uptime Monitor
If you're unsure whether your IT infrastructure can handle being scaled fast, Idera will help you work out where you need to invest extra resources before you find you're over capacity.
It will monitor, plan, manage, and report on IT capacity across all your servers, applications, and networks, with support for Windows, Linux, UNIX (AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Novell), Virtual (VMware, Hyper-V, Xen) and cloud servers.
Using historical trends and other data points, it can work out what you're likely to need in future, allowing you to prepare before your infrastructure creaks under the pressure. Plus, it can analyse what went wrong if you found yourself short on resources in the past and pinpoint exactly how to make sure it never happens again.
Price: On request
