Optimizing Your Resource Capacity vs Demand In OpenAir

Capacity and resource planning is important during good times for a professional services organization. When times get rough, however, optimizing your resource capacity planning and having a tight handle on your projected resource demands is crucial.

There is a lot riding on getting capacity planning right – your revenue depends on it, but so does the job satisfaction of your team members, not to mention your customer’s happiness. 

OpenAir can help you understand your current capacity, forecast your future needs, and keep track of the roles and skills you have available within your organization. Not all of OpenAir’s features are obvious for capacity planning, but leveraging these features will provide data-driven insights you can use to make the right decisions for staffing, profitability, customer satisfaction, and resource availability.

Tracking Skills and Demand in OpenAir

Understanding the skills you already have in your organization is key to ensuring that you can meet customer needs. OpenAir Skill Profiles, however, keep track of more than just your team’s skills.

Keeping track of team skills in OpenAir’s skill profiles allows you to easily identify existing employees that can meet the needs of a client project. Skill profiles can also include tracking things like employee locations or passport and visa information. Data can even be granular to the version of a product or programming language, or industry verticals that the team member has experience in. Just don’t get carried away with what you track.

Skill profiles can also be applied to generic resource accounts within OpenAir. This attaches skills to roles and further increases your ability to project and track future demand.

Capacity Planning by Roles and Skills

Visibility into the skills you have and the roles that you’ll need for projected work is crucial in keeping on top of project demand. As mentioned, combining the free generic resource accounts in OpenAir with skill profiles is one step in that direction. Adding job codes into the mix refines your capacity planning even further.

Job codes are a largely underutilized feature in OpenAir and align well with generics. They are like a bridge between skills and the resources or roles that possess them.  Think of job codes less as a job title and more as a categorization that aligns with the type of employee you bill out to a client. Generic costs can be added to a job code to assist in financial reporting for projects and forecasting.

What’s important is that job codes can be assigned to a generic resource within OpenAir, along with a skill profile, entity tags, and even a work schedule. Generics make it easy to view resources needed for projects without using named team members. 

Even better, tying job codes with generics become a powerful combination when used with a Job Code Detail Report. Out of the box, the Job Code Detail report shows you the current number of staff associated with that job code, and the current number of generics. Together, you can quickly see the number of FTEs you have for a job code compared to the number of FTEs needed for future work. 

Tips and Tricks to Optimize Talent Management and Utilization in OpenAir

Using the Job Code Detail Report to understand capacity is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to leveraging OpenAir for capacity planning and resource demand. There are many other tips and tricks – some that come right out of the box with OpenAir. Here are just a few, but you can find more in our webinar, including how to use job codes with a custom calc to see exactly when your projected billing will start to outpace your current capacity.

Entity Tags for Availability

Entity tags can be highly useful for timing and availability. With these tags, for instance, you can report on when resources start or roll-off. With that information, you can include or exclude resources as required, giving you more control of planning for potential projects.

Straight-line Projections

The straight-line projections feature in OpenAir can help you grasp what resourcing needs might look like for a project you haven’t booked yet. Straight-line projections calculate the number of workdays in a month, then divide the budget by the number of days between the project start and end dates. It’s not a perfect forecast, and there are some downsides to using straight-line projections for more than just a thumbnail of what the project needs will be. But it’s a quick and easy option for seeing resource demands without the overhead of adding in a full project, assigning resources, setting up billing, and so on.

Target Bill Rates and Utilization

These are two settings that can enhance your reporting and demand planning significantly. With target utilization, you can assign a target that a resource is expected to bill to. So, if you expect that your project managers will be 75% billable, you can set that for your project manager users, even generics. It will allow you to see what the expected hours for a given time period will actually be, whether that’s a week, a month, or a year, for those resources.

The other important setting is target bill rate. A target bill rate can be set at the user level based on their role in the company. This makes the cost of resources for projections and demand far more reportable than the single primary bill rate that is frequently used. The options for this value along with the target utilization can be the foundation for some compelling reporting.

Managing resource capacity and demand is critical for both your customers and for the success of your company. OpenAir provides a wealth of capabilities to get the data you need for making informed, quality decisions that benefit your business. 

If you have questions on how to get the most out of OpenAir’s capacity and demand features, Top Step is here to help. Contact us or visit our resource library for more information.