Features

Resource Planner answers one question on one board: where is the squeeze. Demand items go in as plans get committed; capacity is recorded against the same team-and-role combinations; the board compares the two on a quarterly grid and lights the cells red when demand is over capacity. Around the board sit the things that turn a one-off picture into a live planning tool: filters, audit trail, capacity management, and integrations with the rest of the JFDI Planner Suite.

The MVP is being built today against the data model and feature set described below. Tier gates are documented for planning purposes; enforcement lands alongside the Microsoft Marketplace listing.

The board

A grid where the columns are quarters and the rows are unique Team and Role combinations. Each cell shows the sum of effort days for that intersection, shaded against the matching capacity entry.

Click any cell to drill into the individual demand items that contribute to the total. Edit a demand item, change a priority, defer to the next quarter, and the board recomputes the moment you save.

Capture demand, with the reason captured too

A new demand item is a slide-out panel with all the fields a planner actually needs.

The structured fields

• Title and Description: short name, plus a paragraph of context.
• Department: Operations, Technology, Finance, People, Commercial, Delivery, Other (configurable on Enterprise).
• Team and Role: free text that aligns to whatever your organisation already calls things. Must match the capacity entries for comparison to work.
• Period: the quarter the demand applies to. The dropdown ships with quarters out to 2027 by default; admins can extend the list.
• EffortDays: estimated person-days for this period.
• Priority (Critical / High / Medium / Low) and Status (Draft / Submitted / Approved / Deferred / Cancelled).

The audit-trail fields

• RequestedBy: the person who raised the demand, via Microsoft 365 people picker.
• ChangeReason: a free-text field for the reason behind the most recent change. Optional, but encouraged. Combined with SharePoint’s built-in version history, it gives every demand item a defensible change log.
• Created by / Modified by: inherited from SharePoint, no extra config needed.

Capacity management, kept simple

A separate panel manages the CapacitySlots list. Each row is a single line: Department, Team, Role, Period, AvailableDays, with an optional Notes field for context (for example, “two staff on leave in August”). Add a row, edit inline, delete with confirmation. The board reflects changes the moment the panel is closed.

The pattern is deliberately the same as forecasting in a spreadsheet, just without the spreadsheet: one row per team-role-period combination, person-days as the unit, and the result is the line the board reads against.

Filtering, with intent

The filter bar above the board is built for the actual questions PMO leads ask.

• Department: narrow the board to a single department’s rows. Useful when sharing a slice with a department head who only needs their own picture.
• Period range: a From/To pair of quarters. Useful for “let’s look at the next three quarters” and “show me everything from FY27 onwards” framings.
• Text search: matches demand item titles. Useful when you know a specific piece of work is in there somewhere and want to find it without scrolling.
• AND logic: every filter combines. The board updates immediately when any filter changes.

The integration that closes the loop: Decision Planner

Resource Planner is a sibling of Decision Planner. Where Decision Planner records why an organisation committed to a course of action, Resource Planner records what that commitment means in capacity terms. Together they close a loop that neither product closes alone.

Decisions trigger demand

A decision to migrate from one platform to another typically creates infrastructure, training, vendor management, and contractor demand across multiple quarters. With Decision Planner installed alongside Resource Planner, you can link demand items back to the decision that triggered them. Capacity planners see not just what is needed, but why and who authorised it.

Capacity gaps prompt decisions

When the board shows a red cell, the gap usually needs a decision: defer the work, add headcount, descope, sequence differently. With Decision Planner installed, the resolution can be recorded against the gap, with the rationale and the alternatives considered, then closed when the demand re-balances. Both products keep their own audit trails; the cross-references join the story.

The integration is through shared SharePoint list schema. No middleware, no APIs, no extra licensing.

Lives where your team already works

Auto-provisioning, so the first install isn’t a configuration project

The first time the web part loads on a site, it checks for the DemandItems and CapacitySlots lists. If either is missing, it creates them with the full schema (columns, choice values, the person-picker fields, the date types) and shows a confirmation message. No PowerShell, no manual list authoring, no XML schema files.

Designed for governance from day one

Real teams have permission boundaries, retention rules, and audit requirements. Resource Planner reads and writes normal SharePoint lists, so all of that just works.

• Existing permissions apply. A user only sees the demand items and capacity entries they can see in SharePoint.
• Retention policies carry through. Demand and capacity records aren’t deleted independently; they expire the way your tenant says they should.
• Version history is preserved. Every edit to a demand item or capacity slot is in the SharePoint version chain.
• Cross-site list selection (Enterprise) lets a programme office point at any list on any site they have access to, without copying data.

Compatibility and accessibility

Things Resource Planner deliberately leaves to other products

The product has a tightly drawn scope on purpose. The list below is the running record of “no”, with the reason in each case. Most of these requests point to a tool that already does the job better.

No timesheet capture

Resource Planner is a forward planning tool. Actuals belong in the timesheet system your tenant already uses (Project for the Web, Microsoft Project, third-party). The two work alongside each other; we don’t try to do both.

No detailed individual scheduling

The board operates at team-and-role granularity, not named-individual granularity. That keeps the picture useful for portfolio planning. For named scheduling, look at Project for the Web or your existing scheduling tool.

No financial forecasting

EffortDays is the unit. There’s no rate card, no cost rollup, and no currency. Finance partners use the board to inform their forecast model; the forecast model itself lives in finance’s tooling.

No real-time multi-user editing

A SharePoint web part has no SignalR layer. Edits save as they happen; concurrent edits are caught via standard SharePoint concurrency. For most planning teams this is fine because demand and capacity don’t change by the minute.

No external integrations beyond M365 + JFDI suite

Customers ask for Jira, Confluence, Smartsheet, and Workday integrations. We’re deliberately keeping the surface to Microsoft 365 plus the JFDI Planner Suite for now, because that is where the data already lives and the permission model is coherent.

No client-side export beyond SharePoint native

SharePoint lists already export to Excel natively, and that export is more trustworthy than anything we could generate client-side from a filtered board view.

A capacity board earns its keep by being trustworthy across quarters. The boundary above is part of how it stays that way.

Licensing tiers

Resource Planner is available in three tiers. All tiers include the demand-and-capacity board; higher tiers unlock audit, customisation, analytics, and the integration surface for the rest of the JFDI suite.

Essentials is enough for a small team to capture demand on a single site and see the board with the default departments and quarters.

Standard adds the capacity panel, drill-down, filters, the Teams tab surface, and the Decision Planner link-back field that turns the suite into a connected governance + planning view.

Enterprise adds the things a programme office actually needs at scale: custom departments and quarters, audit history, cross-site dashboards, board export, the analytics, and the integration surface for the rest of the JFDI suite.

Tier enforcement will be enforced when the licensing flow lights up alongside the Microsoft Marketplace listing. A 30-day Enterprise trial is included on every install once we ship.

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.

Join the pilotSee pricing