Hi Community Members,
In the recent past I have seen many users struggling with the new way of capacity planning.
In this article I would focus on capacity generation.
Point to Remember: Capacity generation depends on the employee profile table based on the planning attributes configured for the capacity planning & the employment dates of the resources.
In simple words, this means that you should have
- set the planning attributes for the capacity planning and
- generated the employee profile
Below setup will be used in this example:
Group: JavaScript developers
Group with three users: Jenifer.Sands, Tania.Rasia and JC.Smiley (FYI - These users were added today)
Group with skill
Now let's start the setup:
- Set the planning attributes for the capacity planning:
Steps to Follow:
All -> Strategic Planning -> Planning Attributes
2. Generate the Employee Profile:
To generate the employee profile, first you need to have the employee definition.
FYI - In my system, the ‘Employee definitions’ (sn_employee_definition) table has no records.
Follow below steps:
A) Create an Employee Definition:
An active employee definition is a condition to define who is considered as an employee. You can have only one active employee definition per domain.
For example: Follow below steps to create employee definition
- Navigate to Employee Profile > Employee Definition.
- On the employee definition page, click New.
- Select one of the available Table options.
- To create an employee definition from a user table, select User.
- Create a condition from the available filters and clauses.
For example, I have selected the Created as Today for all the three resources mentioned above.
- To mark the employee definition as active, select Active.
- Click Save.
The Generate Employee Profiles option appears with the following message stating that you can regenerate the employee profiles as per the updated definition and generate employee profiles.
Note: When you have multiple employee definitions, ensure you deactivate the current active definition before activating the other.
On clicking the “No of records matching the condition: 3”, following three users are fetched (these users were added today):
Once again, let's check the records in 'Employee Definitions' (sn_employee_definition) table. Note that initially there were no records in this table:
B) Generate Employee Profile
Generate employee profile by clicking on “Generate Employee Profile” button present on the Employee definition page. Warning – “This will create employee profiles. Are you sure you want to continue?” will be shown, select “Proceed”
To check the generated employee profile, follow below steps:
- Navigate to All > Employee Profile > Employee Profiles.
- Apply the filter as required to view the records
C) Populate Planning Attributes for the Generated Employee Profile
Planning Attributes for the generated employee profile records can be generated in multiple ways:
- The easiest way is to use the scheduled job “Populate primary attributes for all resources”: This job will populate the planning attributes such as ‘Primary Resource Group’, ‘Primary Resource Role’, and ‘Primary Resource Skill’ for the employees if the resource is associated with single group, role, and skill.
- There is one more way – to generate the planning attributes’ value from the resource’s record by clicking on the related link – “Populate primary resource attributes”. This will also populate the planning attributes such as ‘Primary Resource Group’, ‘Primary Resource Role’, and ‘Primary Resource Skill’ for the employees if the resource is associated with single group, role, and skill.
- If an employee is assigned to multiple groups, skills, or roles, select the Primary Resource Group, Primary Resource Role, and Primary Resource Skill, using the lookup icon.
Since all the three resources are associated with one group and skill, after executing the scheduled job, all the records are updated as shown below:
Now assign ‘DBA’ role to first two resources and ‘Architect’ role to ‘Jenifer Sands’
After this, executed the scheduled job again and below is the output after executing the job.
Ideally, the employment dates and employee type will be auto-populated based on the employee record. Since this is demo data, it is populated as shown below:
Generate Capacity Details:
Now that planning attributes are populated, and employee profile is generated, let's generate and view the total capacity of the resources with primary attributes. Capacity details help Portfolio Managers to plan and manage planning items depending on the resource availability.
Capacity can be generated in two ways:
- a) Automatically by executing the ‘Generate resource capacity’ scheduled job at regular intervals
- b) Capacity can also be generated manually by following below steps:
Workspaces -> Strategic Planning Workspace -> ‘Resource Capacity’ (from l1 menu)
As mentioned in the very beginning of the article that – “Capacity generation depends on the employee profile table based on the planning attributes configured for the capacity planning & the employment dates of the resources” – Now is the time to test this statement.
Notice the planning attributes and employment start date of the three resources of “JavaScript Developers’ group:
Based on the above setup, you can now easily understand how the capacity is generated in the above setup:
Just to make it clear: Capacity in above table is shown as
1 FTE from Jan – Jun 2024 because only JC Smiley (role: DBA) was in this group in this period.
2 FTE starting Jul 2024 in DBA role because Tania has joined in July 2024
1 FTE starting Jan 2025 in Architect role because Jenifer Sands has joined in Jan 2025
Hope this helps in understanding the steps to generate the capacity.
Happy SPM Learning!!
Thank You!
Namita Mishra
Hi @Namita Mishra . This is a great post. Thank you and for all previous posts on Resource Management. We have looked to a lot of them, and you have such a structure and good way to structure your answer. I am probably one of the contributes lately who have had questions regarding capacity planning, capacity generation and reporting lately as the implementation team are digging deep into RMW and reports.
I have some follow-up questions I would like to get your thoughts on based on this post. Would highly appreciate you looking to the questions, and I think it is highly relevant for other users looking to understand capacity planning and how/what values are displayed in RMW and where those values are coming from:
In short, it relates to which tables are used to retrieve the allocations (effort) and capacity that are displayed in the resource cards in the resource management workspace. We have done some looking into it, but would like to confirm with you so we know what tables to use also for reporting:
In total there are 5 questions (question A-E):
Allocation data and capacity data stated for groups in RMW (primary resource group) (se picture above)
Question A) Are allocated hours in the resource cards in RMW for a group coming from the table: sn_plng_att_core_cpaam_effort?
Question B) What table is the number of total capacity as shown in the resource cards in RMW coming from, and how is capacity calculated here?
***
Allocation data and capacity data stated for resources in RMW (primary resource group) (see picture above):
Question C) Are allocated hours in resource cards in RMW for a user coming from the table: sn_plng_att_core_attribute_based_resource_aggregates?
Question D) Are the sum of effort per user in this table equal to the sum of effort displayed in the RMW?
Question E) Is capacity per user as shown in the resource cards in RMW derived from the table: sn_plng_att_core_attribute_based_resource_aggregates?
