With the Capacity forecast dashboard, you can forecast future capacity requirements for your workspace and team. You can see the estimated planned work, and compare that to your team's availability.
| Example: The Capacity Forecast dashboard is showing the total number of Animation days per week for 3 projects, and comparing those requirements to the total number of working days available for the Animation team (user group). The forecast shows that the team is understaffed to complete the planned work during this time period. |
With this information, you can gain insight into whether you need to ramp up with freelancers, evaluate the possibility of taking on more work, and spot possible spikes in your production.
Creating a Capacity forecast dashboard
1. To create a Capacity forecast, navigate to the Overview page of your site.
2. Click the + Create dashboard button on the dashboard menu, opening Create dashboards window.
3. Select the Capacity forecast option.
4. Type in a Name.
5. Save the setting.
Once saved, the new Capacity forecast will be added and appear in your dashboard menu, where you can open it with a single click.
How the Capacity forecast Works
The forecast report will summarise your estimated work by type and present it by day or week. The summary is based on Events created on your projects and the Estimate that you have set on those Events.
An estimate of 20 person-days of Animation over two weeks will be presented as 10 person-days per week or 2 person-days a day (given a 5-day workweek).
The estimated work can be compared to your team's availability. The availability is based on group memberships. For example, an "Animators" group with 10 members will have the ability to do 10 person-days a day of animation work, or 50 person-days a week. Any Leave Event created for a user will be subtracted from their availability.
Inputting the data used in the forecast report
As we learned, the forecast report is based on Events created with types and estimates, and Group memberships. To use the forecast report to its full potential, we must therefore ensure that we have Events created on our projects, and Groups configured to support how we want our resources to be organized in the Capacity Forecast.
Planning your upcoming projects
When planning your upcoming projects, you can block out a high-level schedule in ftrack using Events.
Events are created on the Projects timeline view of the Overview page. To create an Event, click and drag your mouse along the timeline. You can drag out the entire duration of your Event, or you can opt to further edit the dates in the dialog window that appears when you release.
In the dialog window for your Event, ensure the following information has been entered:
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Name: Enter a name for your Event. Type: Select a Type from the drop-down list that corresponds to the type of work to be completed. Start: The date this phase of work is meant to start. End: The date this phase of work is meant to end. Resource planning: Toggle this on to ensure the information entered in this Event can be accessed in the Capacity Forecast. Estimate (days): The total number of person-days that are being allocated to the Event. |
| Example: An Event called "Animation" has been created for a project called Agent 327. The Type of "Animation" has been applied, it has been scheduled over 2 full weeks, and has an estimate of 40 person-days. |
Repeat this process for all the planned work on your project. This will be a rough work plan that you can communicate with the team, and the basis for your forecast report.
Arranging your team into useful groups
In System Settings, it is possible to create groups for your ftrack users. Create groups that are based on skills or departments and add your members to them. It is important that a user is only a member of one of these groups - if not, you risk counting their availability multiple times.
| Example: A group called "Animation team" has been created, and users have been added to it as members. |
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Tip: The following article explains how to set up Groups for your workspace: |
Setting up your forecast dashboard
After creating the dashboard, a table will be created with rows that correspond to all of the Types that have been configured in your ftrack workspace, and columns that represent each week. Any day estimates that were entered in the Events you created from the timeline view will appear for each Type, and will be broken down per week.
Expanding a row will allow you to see these day estimates broken down per project.
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A: The total number of estimate days per week for all Events of the same Type created on the projects listed. B: The number of estimate days per week for all Events of the same Type created per project. C: The total number of person-days or working days available per week across all users of the group being used for comparison. D: The number of person-days or working days available per week for each user in the group being used for comparison. E: The difference between the estimate days and available person-days per week. |
Exporting to CSV
From the upper-right corner, it is possible to export the forecast data to CSV for further processing outside of ftrack.