Follow these steps to configure Meisterplan so you can accurately accomplish capacity planning and tactical resource management.

• Step 1: Define the Base Capacity for Resources
• Step 2: Define the Base Capacity for Roles
• Step 3: Define FTE and Hours per Day
• Step 4: Accounting for Public Holidays
• Step 5: Accounting for Vacations and Other Leaves
• Step 6: Accounting for Run the Business Activities (RTB)

Step 1: Define the Base Capacity for Resources

To successfully staff people to projects, you first want to ensure you have a clear picture of everyone’s base capacity. Set typical working hours per week for multiple resources by creating a calendar. You can also account for differences in calendars if you have employees in multiple countries or locations.

Calendars are configured under Manage > Calendars (Working Hours). You can learn how to add, edit or delete calendars in the Manage Calendars (Working Hours) article.

Full-Time Employees

When configuring calendars for full-time employees, simply specify the working hours for each day of the week. If your organization has different locations with varying typical weekly working hours, create one calendar for each set of typical working hours.

Part-Time Employees

For part-time employees, make sure to derive their calendars from existing full-time calendars. This saves you time by inheriting any calendar exceptions, such as public holidays, from the existing calendar:

More information on how to create a derived calendar can be found in the Manage Calendars (Working Hours) article.

Step 2: Define the Base Capacity for Roles

If you're allocating roles throughout the project lifecycle, and not just using them to estimate capacity demand early on, then you want to specify their capacity. You can do this either in the Resource Pool or in the Portfolio Designer.

Resource Pool: Open the Resource Pool, select the Roles tab and open the detail view of the respective role:

Portfolio Designer: In the Resource Section, select the desired role and click the three dots at the end of the line, then select Edit Role Capacity from the context menu:

If you want to import capacity changes of several roles at once, you can import them using the Quick Import for Role Capacities.

How Meisterplan Calculates Role Capacities
If you're using both role allocations and resource allocations, the role capacity plus the capacity of resources with that primary role will equal the total capacity for that role. For example, if 2 FTE are assigned directly to the "Consultant – Junior" role and 5 FTE are assigned to named resources whose primary role is "Consultant - Junior", then there will be 7 FTE in total capacity assigned to the "Consultant - Junior" role.

Step 3: Define FTE and Hours per Day

Meisterplan supports planning and analyzing workloads using the units FTE (full time equivalent), days, and hours. FTE and days are relative units and can be customized.

Defining FTE

To define the amount of weekly working hours that equal 1 FTE, select a calendar and set it to Default Calendar. If resources on the Default Calendar work 40 hours a week, then 1 FTE equals 40 hours in your system.

You can set a calendar to default by selecting the Use as default calendar option as described in the Manage Calendars (Working Hours) article.

Defining Hours per Day

The Meisterplan default for hours per day is 8 hours. If you want to change this, update the Person Day in Hours setting for your Meisterplan system. This ensures an accurate calculation of hours to person days and vice versa.

Learn more about this setting in the Manage Advanced article.

Step 4: Accounting for Public Holidays

Calendar exceptions allow you to record and account for holidays where employees have the day off or working hours are decreased. 

New Meisterplan systems include preconfigured calendars with public holidays for different countries.
To add a single calendar exception, click Add Exception in the Calendar Exceptions section. To bulk import all public holidays of a country, click Import Public Holidays.

Learn more in the Manage Calendars (Working Hours) article.

Step 5: Accounting for Vacations and Other Leaves

Resource absences allow you to account for personal time off such as vacations or parental leave. You have three options:

• Import absences from a spreadsheet using the Quick Import for Resource Absences (learn more).
• Add absences manually in the Resource Pool (learn more):
  

Step 6: Accounting for Run the Business Activities (RTB)

Sometimes people have capacity demands that are not associated with a project. Such demands are often daily activities like filling out paperwork or answering emails (sometimes also called "Business as Usual" or "Keep the lights on"). It is important to factor this work into the total capacity demand to ensure your capacity planning is accurate.

Account for RTB work by creating one project per team or department that rolls up to a RTB program. In the example above, a project was created for each department, Software Engineering and Professional Services. The demand for RTB work is then estimated to block a resource or role’s capacity.

Read more about how to create a program in the Working with Programs article.