How Much More Work Can We Do?

Here are simple steps you can take to have better visibility on resources and answer the question: “How much more work can we do?”. They are geared towards answering the question how much can we do this month. But the same principals apply if you want to look at it for a week, a quarter, a year, etc.

  1. Break your project down into separate months.
  2. Put in all the team members on that project (the whole project team).
  3. Add in each person’s total availability to work for the month.
  4. As you enter in tasks for that project, put in the estimated hours each person will spend on that task.
  5. Keep a rolling sum of estimated hours per person for the month.
  6. Subtract that rolling sum from total availability.

This will show you how much time each person has left for the month, based on current workload.  If you are considering adding on a new task, think about how much time it will take a specific team member to do that task. Then, see if that person has the availability left to take it on.

These type of calculations are automatically done by Vertabase project management software. Project management software also makes it far easier to see this information across all projects and to scale for large numbers of people with varying schedules (including holidays, sick days, etc.)

Project Management: Getting Started with Estimated Hours

One helpful piece of information to get on a project is estimated hours per task. This is a measure of how much work or effort a particular task will take.  Not to be confused with due date (when a task will be done), estimated hours is a reflection of how much of a person’s time the task will take. Knowing this will help you better allocate that person’s time. It will make it easier to juggle tasks across projects and plan out people’s workload.

Getting estimated hours from internal staff can sometimes be hard. First off, people may worry that if they tell you it will take 8 hours, you’ll be mad when its not done by the end of the day.  They might also be afraid that if it takes them longer then the estimate, they’ll be penalized.  These fears can keep people from giving estimates. 

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