How to use the resource planning view in VOGSY

Effective resource planning is critical for professional services companies. It helps ensure the right people are working on the right tasks at the right time, avoiding both overutilization (which can lead to burnout) and underutilization (which reduces profitability).

VOGSY's resource planning gives an overall view of all billable and non-billable activities.

VOGSY resource planning supports:

Optimized utilization: Proper resource planning helps ensure employees are appropriately staffed on projects. You can allocate your workforce effectively by clearly viewing upcoming projects, their timelines, and required skill sets. VOGSY minimizes the risk of overplanning (leading to burnout and decreased quality of work) and underutilization (leading to wasted resources and reduced profitability).

Improved profitability: Efficient resource allocation directly impacts the bottom line. Overplanning can lead to increased costs (overtime, potential project delays), while underutilization means paying for talent that isn't generating revenue.

Enhanced project delivery: When the right people with the right skills work on the right projects at the right time, projects are more likely to be delivered on time and within budget.

Better decision-making: Resource planning provides valuable data for strategic decision-making. By analyzing resource utilization trends, potential skill gaps, hiring needs, and opportunities for training and development can be identified.

The resource planning view shows the future utilization of employees, contractors, and placeholders.

If you want to start planning for a project but don't know which resources to assign, use a Placeholder to reserve the necessary hours to complete the activities. This will allow you to get more insight into the work that must be performed. Later, you can exchange the Placeholder hours for hours from employees as needed.

The placeholder can also be used to plan applicants.

There are four different planning views for resource planning:

1. Actuals and planned. This view shows you every planned hour, including time off and tracked time. When scrolling back in time, it displays all actual hours and their status (draft, submitted, and approved)

2. Planned only. This view shows you every planned hour, including time off, in the future and the past. When scrolling back in time, it displays how much time was planned.

3. Available. This view shows you the availability of resources in hours. That is the working hours on working days minus the planned hours.

4. Time off only. This view shows only the time off for resources, making it ideal for reviewing holiday schedules for a department or group of employees.

VOGSY provides detailed insight into current and future allocations through three types of bookings:

Opportunity bookings contain a list of activities required for the project, including expected start and finish dates, required FTEs (full-time equivalent), seniority level, required skills and skill levels, and assigned resources. Bookings provide insights into the "gap" between current resources and prospective project demands. They help predict resource needs, assess workforce capacity, and identify skill/personnel shortfalls. This foresight helps prevent bench time and maximize workforce efficiency. Bookings answer the question: "Can we resource our future projects with the current team?".

Soft bookings are used for the resource planning on projects with "Opportunity pending" status. These represent tentative hours based on anticipated workloads for prospective client engagements that are not yet confirmed. Soft bookings provide insight into potential resource needs and allow for proactive planning. They are included in the revenue forecast.

Hard bookings represent hours planned on projects with "New" or "In progress" status. They definitely allocate resources. In the " Revenue Forecast chart," these hours appear in the "Orderbook" section.

Legend

The different bookings are marked differently in the schedule as shown in the legend below.

To change a resource's hours, find the resource and tap their row to display assigned deliverables and activities. Locate the activity to edit, move across the row to the corresponding week, and tap the cell to adjust the hours.

The option is available to plan the remaining hours to plan. Use this button to plan these hours.

The Resource Planning view has multiple filter options to ensure you can filter out the resources you seek for your next project. Filtering is on departments, activities, seniority levels, skills and skill sets, and custom labels.

Sorting is possible by resource name and last plan date. With this last option, the resources that will be out of work first are shown at the top of the list.

All columns, except 'Hours to plan', are initially off. If you want, you can toggle them on. The following columns are available:

Start date. The start date of the activity.

Finish date. The finish date of the activity

Allocated. The number of hours allocated to this resource is calculated from the project.

Hours spent. The number of submitted and approved hours.

Hours in draft. The number of hours that this resource has left to submit.

Planned. The number of hours planned for future weeks.

You can toggle on the totals to get an overview of available working hours, total planned or available, per week or per day.

Working hours total. All available working hours for the selected resources.

Planned total. The total of all scheduled hours for the selected resources.

Available total. The total number of available hours for the selected resources.