Blog - How to solve your capacity management problems

You may have forgotten the 1998 film A Bug’s Life (though nobody would fault you for forgetting a 25-year-old kids’ film), but there is an excellent bit of wisdom delivered in a small scene by the main villain – Hopper.

Just as everything goes wrong for Flik, the new leader of the ants, she looks for things to blame. That’s when Hopper comes out with, “ah ah ah, first rule of leadership: Everything is your fault.” When projects and plans all start to unravel, the fault usually lies with the people who made those plans, not the ones executing them.

However, a lot of things that don’t work (and a precious few that can) help bring teams and people together when it matters most.

At Tempo, we’ve been working with a wide variety of teams that follow a whole range of methodologies. One of our goals is helping companies take a strategic stance where individuals are achieving their best work, teams are well-orchestrated, and business units are sharing resources and staying aligned on their priorities.

Ultimately, that’s the recipe for a high-performing strategic enterprise. Unfortunately, it’s a hard recipe to get right.

So what?

Team planning can get really messy when every team takes its own approach. How can a professional services team, which plans on an individual basis, stay on the same page with an agile development group that plans work on a team basis?

For companies to truly benefit from capacity management, they need to enable both individual and team planning – ideally, both within the same dashboard.

So that’s what the Tempo Planner team decided to do – they spent the past year working on dozens of features to bridge the gap between individual and team level planning and help leaders manage their resources, people, and projects and not have to double-check where everything is or keep a running tab in their head.

Here is a quick blast of what we added:

• New Team planning views for team-centric planning aid product companies with visualizing multiple teams, managing shared resources, and team plans.

• A new team capacity dashboard for centralized insights into organizational or departmental capacity, utilization, and team operational efficiency.

• Team specific insights within the dashboard to help pinpoint bottlenecks and areas where productivity can be improved.

• Team capacity indicators for planning and managing all of an organization's team capacity during PI planning directly within the tool.

There is so much value leaders can get from having better visibility into how individuals and teams are being utilized, how tasks are prioritized, and how to effectively share resources to accomplish each goal in the order it should be done.

Remember, there’s a flip side to Hopper’s leadership insight: Everything may be your fault when it’s going sideways, but when things start running more smoothly you get to take some credit for that too.

No more overbooking or stale spreadsheets! Try it out.