Capacity planning still lives in a spreadsheet. It shouldn’t.
Pick any organisation that runs a portfolio of work and ask where forward capacity is tracked. Nine times in ten the answer is a workbook one person owns, three people partly trust, and nobody else can see. The picture goes stale between quarterly reviews. Capacity gaps surface late. Decisions get made against the wrong numbers because the workbook said one thing and the team owners knew another.
Resource Planner moves that picture onto a shared board inside SharePoint. Demand items go in as they’re raised. Capacity is recorded against the same team-and-role combinations. The board compares the two on a quarterly grid, in real time, with traffic-light shading on every cell. The picture is the same whether you open it on Monday morning or in the middle of a budget round.
One board, every quarter
Columns are quarters, rows are Team and Role. Each cell shows the sum of effort days and the headroom against capacity. Green when there’s room, amber when it’s tight, red when it’s over, slate when capacity hasn’t been recorded yet.
Demand, with the why preserved
Every demand item carries a description, a priority, a status, and the person who raised it. A change-reason field captures the audit trail when plans shift. The board reads from a SharePoint list you already govern.
Decisions and demand, linked
A demand item can reference the decision that triggered it. A capacity gap can prompt a decision to be recorded against it. Resource Planner and Decision Planner read each other’s lists, so the audit trail joins up across products.
Why teams choose Resource Planner
A board the PMO, the team owners, and the finance partner all read the same way
The product is intentionally shape-neutral. There’s no methodology to subscribe to. Teams are whatever your organisation calls teams. Roles are the role labels your team owners already use. Periods are calendar quarters. Effort is days. Once a demand item is in the right team/role/period cell, the board takes care of the rest.
What forward planning should feel like
“We stopped finding capacity gaps in the wrong quarter. The board surfaces them in the right one.”
That is the value Resource Planner is built around. The product is in active development today; the MVP is being built against the data model and feature set described on the features page. Customer stories will land here as pilot users come online.
Two lists, one board, no migration
Your tenant, your lists, your capacity model
Resource Planner stores everything in two SharePoint lists: DemandItems (the work) and CapacitySlots (the people). Both lists live inside the site where the web part is added, governed by the retention and permission rules you already have. The licensing service receives only the tenant ID and the app ID over HTTPS; no demand data, no capacity numbers, and no people data ever leaves your control.
Remove the web part, the records stay put
The board is a view. Uninstalling Resource Planner removes the surface but leaves the underlying lists untouched. Existing demand items keep their values, capacity entries stay where they are, and SharePoint search still finds everything. There is no parallel database to drain, no migration when you change your mind.
See the features
Board view, demand capture, capacity management, filters, audit trail, Decision Planner integration.
Browse the use cases
PMO portfolio planning, departmental capacity, programme delivery, finance forecast, multi-team coordination.
Want to see where the squeeze is, before slip dates do?
Resource Planner is coming to the Microsoft commercial marketplace once the MVP build is complete. Pilot tenancies are coming online today; the full Enterprise surface ships with every install.