ForumsTime ManagementCapacity Planning


Capacity Planning
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Ann M

Posted: Nov 14, 2013
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Does anyone use Toodledo to due "visual" capacity planning and by that I mean creating a timeline. The current product works great and I use the length of time field and the start and due dates, but presentation is just a list and sometimes I need to see what this looks like visually in a calendar in order to determine if I can take on more work.

The calendar feature doesn't accomplish this because it's just dots and doesn't show the "duration" of the project. I realize that I could use other project management software but I have tried that and it's too much work since everything I need is in Toodledo.

I was thinking I could just export the information and graph it in a spreadsheet since this isn't something I would use daily. Just wondering if others could share any ideas they might use. Thanks.
Salgud

Posted: Nov 14, 2013
Score: 0 Reference
For me, when I need capacity planning, it's time to haul out the 44 Mag, MS Project. Yes, it takes time, quite a bit of it just learning how to use it (90+ percent of Project users have no clue as to how to properly use it), but it handles capacity planning far better than TD, or any other available task manager, and gives you Critical Path Method scheduling, which is much better than simple capacity planning. When you plan for capacity only, not considering the critical path aspects of a project large enough to require capacity planning, you usually end up with a much, much longer schedule than would be possible with CPM scheduling. And the much higher costs associated with a longer project.

Focusing on one aspect of Project Management, like capacity, invariably leads to other aspects, like cost and quality, going out of control.

In my opinion, if you're serious enough to want capacity planning, get a serious tool to manage it.
R.Welsh

Posted: Nov 16, 2013
Score: 0 Reference
As I do this infrequently, I just export to Excel, add a column for month and create a pivot table of Month vs sum of length. You can also make some manual adjustments to the list of tasks in Excel for repeating tasks.
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