A schedule can be flawless and still impossible. All it takes is three parallel tasks assigned to the same person. On a Gantt chart those bars sit neatly side by side; in real life they mean one person would have to work at triple capacity. Resource planning is the part of planning that exposes that contradiction.
Real capacity is not 40 hours a week
The most common planning error is assuming a full-time employee gives a project 40 hours a week. In reality the hours disappear before project work even starts:
| Where time goes | Typical amount per week |
|---|---|
| Meetings and internal communication | 4–8 h |
| Business-as-usual work that does not pause for the project | 5–15 h |
| Interruptions, context switching, waiting | 3–5 h |
| Holidays, sick days, training (across the year) | ~10% of the year |
A practical rule of thumb: plan 25–30 hours of project work per week for a full-time person, not 40. If the plan needs more than that, it is not ambitious — it is already late.
Four things a resource view shows
- Overload. Who has more work at once than they can physically do.
- Underuse. Who is waiting for work nobody prepared.
- Bottleneck. One person too much of the project runs through — usually the one who "knows everything".
- Cross-project conflict. Two project managers booking the same person for the same week, neither aware of the other.
The fourth is the only one invisible from inside a single project. Seeing it requires a portfolio view — all projects at once, by person.
How to resolve overload
- Level the load. Push tasks that have float to a later date. This does not move the deadline as long as the work is off the critical path.
- Add resource. Costs money and ramp-up time — a new person is not at full speed immediately.
- Cut scope. Fastest and least popular. Requires the client's decision.
- Extend the deadline. An honest answer when the other three do not work.
The one option that is not a solution is assuming the team will make it up in overtime. That works for a month, not for a quarter.
Skills are not interchangeable
Resource planning is not just dividing hours. Two people with the same job title are not the same resource. Plan only for load and ignore skills, and you get a plan that balances in the spreadsheet and jams in practice.
The same applies to critical knowledge: if one person is the only one who can do something, they are both a bottleneck and a risk. That belongs in the risk register, not only in the resource plan.
A weekly routine that keeps load under control
- Look at the next two weeks by person, not by project total.
- Find rows where planned hours exceed realistic capacity.
- Check whether the overloaded task is on the critical path. If not, move it.
- If it is, decide immediately: resource, scope or deadline.
- Talk it through with the team. Someone who knows their load is monitored raises problems earlier.
How Projektiassistent helps
In Projektiassistent tasks carry owners and estimates, so workload is not a separate spreadsheet — it falls straight out of the project plan. The Kanban board shows how much work is in progress at once; the Gantt view shows where tasks overlap. The portfolio view surfaces where the same person is planned into several projects at once, before it hits the weekly plan.
Summary
Resource planning starts with honest capacity: 25–30 hours of project work per week, not 40. Look at load by person rather than by task, hunt for bottlenecks and cross-project conflicts, and when overload appears, decide — level, add, cut or extend. All four beat silent hope.
To see who is actually overloaded, start here: projekt2.projektiassistent.ee.