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

• Step 1: Base Capacity for Resources
• Step 2: Base Capacity for Teams (Optional)
• Step 3: Base Capacity for Roles
• Step 4: FTE and Hours per Day
• Step 5: Public Holidays
• Step 6: Vacations and Other Leaves
• Step 7: Run the Business Activities (RTB)

Step 1: 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. In Meisterplan, you can define your organization's full-time calendar and set holidays under Manage > Calendars & Working Hours. You can set up multiple calendars in order to differentiate the calendars at different locations/offices.

More information on how you can add, change and delete calendars can be found in the Manage Calendars & Working Hours article.

Part-Time

When a resource works part-time, you can add their part-time working model in the Resource Details manually or import it using our Quick Import for Part-Time Working Models.

Learn more about adding part-time working models in the article Resource Pool - Resources.

Step 2: Base Capacity for Teams (Optional)

If you are planning with teams, create the required teams in the Resource Pool under Teams and assign the respective resources. You can assign resources for a limited period, or with half of their capacity:

The capacity of a team is the sum of the allocated resource capacities for the respective time period. The capacity of the resources is reduced accordingly.
For example, if you assign a resource with 50% of their capacity to a team, the resource itself only has 50% capacity available. And only 50% of that resource's capacity will count towards the role capacity (see below). This applies even if the team is not allocated to any project.

Step 3: Base Capacity for Roles

The capacity of a role is the sum of the capacities of all resources with this role as primary role (project roles do not count towards the base capacity of a role). If you want to simulate what your project portfolio would look like with more or less capacity, you can change the capacity of a role in the Resource Pool or 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 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.

Role capacity is relevant when you're planning in one of the following situations:

• You work exclusively with roles in Meisterplan
  • In this case, enter the planned allocation for the project cycle on a role basis (ex., Consultant - Junior with 5 FTE).
• You work with roles for high-level planning, and resources and teams when fine-tuning the details
  • For example, you initially allocate a project on a role-basis, and only at a later date allocate the project to specific resources or teams.
• You only use roles to simulate capacity changes, in addition to traditional planning with resources
  • For example, you create a scenario in which 5 Junior Consultants have an extra role capacity of 2 FTE. In this way, you can figure out what you could achieve if you employed 2 more Junior Consultants.

Learn more about this in the articles:

• Quick Import: Role Capacities
• Role Capacity Changes

Step 4: 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 5: Public Holidays

Public holidays have an effect on your resources' capacity. In Meisterplan, you can manually input public holidays, or import them for each office. Additionally, you can define if resources are completely unavailable or have limited working hours for each public holiday.

New Meisterplan systems include preconfigured calendars with public holidays for different countries.

To add a single public holiday, click Add Holiday in the Public Holidays section. To bulk import all public holidays of a country, click Import Public Holidays.

Learn more in the Manage Calendars & Working Hours article.

Step 6: 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 7: 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 a project per 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 the capacity or a resource, team or role.

When working with teams, you can simply assign the team's resources with 80% of their capacity to account for the resource's Run the Business activities.

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