Resource planning in the project portfolio: Who is available — and who is already booked?
Your projects are carefully planned, the dates are set — and yet your initiatives keep slipping. Ask around and you always hear the same causes: some resources are scheduled on several projects at once, for others nobody knows for sure whether last quarter’s commitment still holds, and still others would have room to spare — only nobody outside their department has noticed.
This is rarely a planning error in an individual project. Every project manager has planned their own project carefully. The problem only arises where the plans meet: with the people who are scheduled on several projects. Without that view, you end up managing dates — and only realize from the delays that the capacity was never there.
This article first clarifies what resource planning is actually about — in everyday work, the terms get mixed up freely — and then shows how extended resource management in PlainPPM puts it into practice.
Capacity, allocation, demand: three terms, three different statements
Most misunderstandings in resource planning come from terms that were never clearly defined:
- Capacity is the supply: How much working time does a person actually have available in a month? Part-time work, vacation and line duties belong here — not in the projects.
- Allocation is the decision: This person works on this project, at this share, in this month.
- Demand is what the plan requires: This is how much effort the project needs according to the baseline — regardless of whether anyone has been allocated yet.
The value comes from the comparison. Demand without allocation means the project is planned but not staffed. Allocation above capacity means the person is overbooked. Only when these three figures sit side by side does resource planning give you facts instead of a gut feeling.
Why overbooking costs more than it seems
At first glance, a person at 110% utilization looks like a small problem: an extra 10% will work out somehow. In reality, overbooking doesn’t behave in a linear way.
Anyone working on several initiatives at once loses time not only to the work itself but to the transitions: getting back up to speed, rebuilding context, catching up on agreements. These switching costs don’t show up in any plan because they aren’t assigned to any project. There is a second effect, too: when a person is missing from three projects, all three are delayed — the overload of a single role turns into a delay for an entire portfolio.
That’s why the decisive question when people are overloaded isn’t “Who works more?” but “Which initiative do we postpone so that the others stay on track?” You can only answer it when you can see where a person’s workload comes from — project by project.
Two perspectives — and why you need both
Resource planning serves two audiences with opposite questions:
- Project coordinators look from the project to the team: Is my initiative staffed? Who am I missing, and who still has room?
- Resource managers look from the person to their projects: Is my team scheduled at a sustainable level? Who is overbooked, and where does the load come from?
Both work with the same numbers, but a table built for one question doesn’t serve the other. When the two views come from separate files, you get the classic argument over whose list is right. The point isn’t which view is correct — it’s that both must be calculated from the same data.
What you need
- Up-to-date capacities. Without a recorded supply, every utilization figure is a number with no point of reference. Part-time levels and shares of line work are part of this.
- A planning rhythm that matches the decision. For portfolio decisions, the month is usually all you need. Week-by-week resource planning across an entire portfolio costs more upkeep than it delivers in insight.
- Roles and skills recorded for each person. Otherwise you can see that someone is fully booked, but not who could fill the gap instead.
- A distinction between requested and confirmed. A tentative booking that nobody has committed to yet must not look like a commitment in the utilization view.
- The willingness to act on what you see. A utilization view makes overload visible. It doesn’t remove it.
How extended resource management works in PlainPPM
The PlainPPM standard already covers capacities and reservations — tentative bookings where the project share hasn’t been set yet, month by month, resource by resource. Extended resource management builds on this and adds two additional views of the same data: allocation by project and allocation by resource.
You start with the slice that matters to you. You filter by role, skill or the status of the resource request — requested or confirmed. If you’re looking at a department, a program or a phase, you filter accordingly instead of scrolling through the entire portfolio.
The project view shows each initiative with its demand across the months. One click expands the project to show everyone working on it. You allocate directly in the cell, and you decide how much a single click allocates. The project total and the remaining capacity update in real time. Below that, you see what the baseline plans for this project — so allocation and demand sit directly one above the other, without switching to a second report.
The resource view reverses the direction: from the person to their projects. Green still has room, yellow is getting tight, red is too much. One click shows where the load comes from — project by project, requested or confirmed. If the remaining capacity drops below zero, the person is overbooked, and the chart makes it visible: stacked by project, against the line of what the person can deliver. Every new allocation appears in the chart immediately — you see what it costs the moment you make it.
What the feature deliberately doesn’t do: It doesn’t optimize automatically, and it doesn’t suggest people. It calculates and shows — people make the decisions. This limit is intentional: automation that redistributes allocations without knowing the commitments, skills and agreements behind them produces plans that nobody sticks to.
The feature on video (in German)
A minute and a half that walks through the whole process once — from the standard view through project allocation to the utilization chart.
Frequently asked questions
For portfolio decisions, the month is usually all you need. Finer intervals take considerably more upkeep and rarely change the decision.
In three places at once: the cell turns red, the remaining capacity becomes negative, and in the chart the bar rises above the capacity line.
They are marked as requested, which sets them apart from confirmed allocations — both in the view and in the filter. That way, a tentative booking never looks like a commitment.
No. The view makes utilization and free capacity visible; you make the choice. Automatic optimization is deliberately not included.
No, it complements it. Capacity and reservations remain in the standard; the two allocation views are added on top.
No. PlainPPM runs 100% on Microsoft 365 standards in your organization’s tenant; extended resource management is an extension from the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk.
Conclusion
Resource bottlenecks are almost always noticed too late — not because nobody planned, but because the plans run side by side and only overlap through the people, or rather the resources. That’s why visibility is the first step: utilization across all projects and all months, readable in both directions, with a clear distinction between requested and confirmed.
You can try it out for yourself. Extended resource management is ready for you in the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk: open the extension with sample data in the trial environment, allocate a person, and see right away what that means for their utilization — without changing anything in your own environment. If it’s a good fit, we build it into your PlainPPM environment; the PlainPPM core remains untouched.
PlainPPM is project and project portfolio management built entirely on standard Microsoft 365 – native to Microsoft 365, optimized for Microsoft Teams, built on the Microsoft Power Platform. Book a demo
