On the lookout for a free resource capacity planning spreadsheet template?
Snag our downloadable resource capacity plan template, accessible in both Excel spreadsheet and Google Sheets formats, to jump start your resource capacity planning journey.
And for those of you skeptical about spreadsheets doing the trick, fear not – we’ve got your back. We’ll explore alternative options for resource capacity planning that go above and beyond.
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Free resource capacity planning template features
Checkout the features packed into our resource capacity planning spreadsheet template:
- Capacity Management: Seamlessly handle capacity with working days per month and resource count.
- Project and Resource Allocations Tracking: Stay on top of project allocations with a detailed breakdown by project and resource.
- Color-Coded Utilization Reporting: Get a visual insight into your resource utilization through our color-coded reporting system.
- Comprehensive Availability Summary: Obtain a panoramic view of availability across all your teams.
- Resource Analysis: Visualize resource shortfalls in either FTE or days.
- Tailor it to your needs: Perfect for both capacity planning and resource forecasting.
Resource capacity planning spreadsheet template Excel: Free download
Follow the link below to download the template in Excel format.
Resource capacity planning spreadsheet template Google Sheets: Free download
Follow the link below to download the template as a Google Sheet.
Download Google Sheets: free resource capacity planning template
Kelloo's resource capacity planning tools
Resource planning, capacity forecasting and reporting in one place. We help you get the most from your projects and people.
Kelloo - a better alternative to resource capacity planning spreadsheets
If you think spreadsheets are not a great fit for resource capacity planning, there are better options and solutions to consider. Perhaps resource capacity planning software may be a better option?
Solutions like Kelloo provide a simple and cost effective way to manage your resource capacity planning process. Here are some of the key differences between a tool like Kelloo and a resource capacity planning spreadsheet.
- Visual representation of your resource capacity plan.
- Supply vs demand analysis.
- What if planning to explore alternative scenarios.
- Built in features for resource planning, forecasting and what if analysis.
- Report builder so you can create your own analysis.
- Supports both agile resource planning and waterfall planning.
The capacity planner in Kelloo shows you the gap between your resource supply and your resource demand so you can spot resource and team constraints and shortfalls.
Use the heatmap to spot resources and teams that are overloaded or have the capacity to take on more work.
Kelloo includes a powerful report builder so you can build and share your own analysis and reports.
Why resource capacity planning using a spreadsheet may not be a good idea
Spreadsheets tend to be the go-to solution for initially building a resource capacity plan. But let’s face it – they come with their limitations and might not be the ideal fit for everyone.
Difficult and cumbersome to update
A must have feature of any capacity planning tool is the ability to quickly make schedule changes. For example, moving a project forward in time by 3 months.
Sounds simple doesn’t it? Or you may need to change around the resources allocated to a project (which is something you are going to want to do a lot).
But the thing is, doing this in a spreadsheet will mean editing lots of cells and copying formulas. Is this something you really want to be doing? The chances are you will end up spending hours each week updating a resource capacity planning spreadsheet due to the sheer amount of data it will hold.
Spreadsheets create silos of resource capacity planning data
As your team grows the resource capacity planning function will get split between different managers. So using a spreadsheet based solution inevitably means multiple resource capacity planning spreadsheets in use. I guess you can see where we are going here?
Trying to create an overview of your resource status becomes a monster headache and involves consolidating the data from multiple sources. This is a major opportunity to introduce errors and omissions into your resource capacity planning data.
Spreadsheets are static and one dimensional
When resource capacity planning, you need to look at different resource and project options and weigh the pros and cons to be able to make a decision. To do this you need to shift project timelines around, model what happens if you hire more people etc. This is often called what if analysis. And you need to see the result of the changes as you make them. Which you can’t do in a spreadsheet.
In Kelloo you can create scenarios which let you model changing things like resource levels and see how they will impact your plans.
Lack of reporting
You will build up a lot of valuable data when resource capacity planning and being able to report, share and visualize the data is key. Tools like Excel let you build charts over your data but this is not easy to do, is time consuming and difficult to share. Whereas most resource capacity planning tools have out of the box resource capacity planning reports you can run straight away.
