Time and workload Project workload plan
A project workload plan sets what is committed against what is available, week after week and resource by resource. The exercise looks simple and is very often done in a spreadsheet. The problem is almost never the layout: it is that the capacity entered in it is a theoretical capacity, and a theoretical capacity lies.
Workload plan, n.
Two confusions are worth clearing up. A workload plan is not a schedule: the schedule orders tasks over time, the workload plan says whether the people exist to do them. And it is not an occupancy tracker either: it looks ahead, not behind.
The distinction from the schedule is not academic: it explains most of the delays wrongly attributed to poor estimation. The workload had been correctly estimated; it was the availability of the people to produce it that had not been.
Why a theoretical capacity lies.
Five gaps separate the contract day from the day really available for a project. Each is known; it is their accumulation that surprises.
Leave and absences
Most of them are known in advance, and yet they are rarely subtracted from a workload plan built at the start of a project.
Non-project time
Internal meetings, interviews, training, pre-sales. It is real, it is useful, and it produces no client deliverable.
Multi-assignment
A person on three projects is not at a third on each: the cost of switching from one context to another is taken from all three.
Actual staffing
The person planned is not always the one who arrives, nor at the planned level. Nominal capacity is held, useful capacity is not.
Real capacity is not decreed, it is deduced: from the time spent in past weeks, the declared absences, and the staffing actually assigned. That is why a workload plan with no link to time entry remains a hypothesis.
The effect of this gap is always the same, and it happens in this order. The plan announces a capacity that does not exist, the team absorbs the gap by working more, the project holds anyway for a few weeks, and no one sees a problem since deliveries arrive. Then the first unforeseen event occurs, and there is no room left to absorb it, because it had already been used up to keep a false plan going.
This is why the review of a workload plan should first look at its capacity assumptions, not at the distribution of the workload. A badly distributed plan is fixed in one meeting; a plan built on a wrong capacity is fixed by revising a commitment, which is an entirely different conversation.
Weeks by resources, ready to reuse.
The minimal form that makes a workload plan decidable. Values are in working days over the week considered.
| Line | What goes in it | Where the value comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Gross capacity | The working days of the week, per person. | The calendar. |
| Absences | Leave, training, known sick leave. | The absence management system. |
| Non-project time | Internal meetings, pre-sales, supervision. | The time observed in past weeks. |
| Net capacity | What really remains available for projects. | Calculated: gross minus absences minus non-project. |
| Committed workload per project | One line per project, with the days planned over the week. | The remaining work of each work package. |
| Gap | Net capacity minus committed workload. It is the only line you look at. | Calculated. |
SOURCE Outline drawn from orgatypik practice, tested on supervised projects in IT services companies. It can be reused as it stands.
An overload that lasts is no longer a scheduling problem.
One week over capacity is made up. Six consecutive weeks over capacity are no longer a planning accident: it is a state of the team, and it produces its effects well before showing up as a delivery delay.
This is the point where the workload plan stops being a production tool and becomes a signal. In retrospect, when a consultant leaves, the signals existed; what was missing was a place where they were written down, dated, and read by someone other than the person concerned.
Reading the workload next to the dated commitment, and not in a separate file, is exactly what we call operational commitment management.
In pylotik.
The workload plan is not a separate document: it is a view on the project's data.
A deduced capacity, not an entered one
It is calculated from the actual time spent, absences and actual staffing, instead of being set as a hypothesis at the start.
The workload comes from the remaining work
Each work package carries its remaining work, and that is what feeds the coming weeks. The plan moves when the project moves.
Overload is seen before the delay
The gap between net capacity and committed workload is visible over the coming weeks, while a decision is still possible.
The link with margin is direct
A workload that overruns on a fixed-price project does not only drift the deadline: it consumes the margin. Both are read in the same place.
The entry that feeds all this is described on time entry software, and the contractual framework on the commitment levels. The full tour is on the product page.
What we are asked about the workload plan.
How do you calculate the real capacity of a project team?
Start from working days, then subtract the known absences and the non-project time observed in past weeks. The third term is the one that gets forgotten, and it is often the heaviest.
Over what horizon should you project?
Six to eight weeks for an operational plan, a quarter for decision-making. Beyond that, the projection becomes an intention: it has its value, but it no longer serves to decide on a staffing.
Do you need a workload plan per project or per person?
Both readings are needed and it is the same data. By project, you see whether the commitment holds. By person, you see who is overloaded, which a plan by project always hides.
Isn't a spreadsheet enough?
It is enough for the layout, and it fails on the feeding: capacity is entered by hand there, so it is theoretical, and it goes stale as soon as the file is closed. It is the link with real time spent that makes the difference, not the format of the table.
What should you do about an overload you cannot resolve?
Make it visible and date it. An overload that is accepted and recorded is a decision; an overload that is endured in silence becomes a delay, then sometimes a departure. The second costs much more than the first.
Does the client see the workload plan?
No. Workload, like margin and management, is part of the supplier's internal data. The client sees progress, milestones and the risks that concern them.
How do you include leave in a workload plan?
By subtracting it from gross capacity before any assignment, not by treating it as a contingency. The summer leave of a team of ten removes several person-weeks from a quarter: discovering them in June turns a fact known since January into a staffing emergency.
What should you do when a person is on three projects?
First write it down, which is often enough to reveal the impossibility. Then reserve part of their capacity for the cost of switching between contexts rather than distributing all of it: a person at a third on three deals produces less than three thirds of a person.
Going further.
- Time entry: the data that makes capacity real.
- Fixed-price tracking: what an overload does to margin.
- Operational commitment management: the definition of the category.
- The product tour: workload, planning, financials, committees.