Capacity Planning for PMOs Made Real

About this webinar

An urgent project arrives, but the people needed to deliver it are already committed. What should leadership change? Without a forward-looking capacity plan, that question can become a scramble to find people after work has already been approved.

In this on-demand conversation, Edita Kemzūraitė and Joe Pusz join TransparentChoice CEO Stuart Easton to explore capacity planning as an organisational discipline, not just a PMO scheduling exercise. The discussion separates planning the roles, skills, technology and funding future work will require from assigning named resources once delivery is underway.

What you’ll hear

• Plan capacity before assigning people. Forward capacity planning asks what future work will require before resource management turns those requirements into specific assignments.
• Make the consequences of new work visible. When an executive asks for a project to start now, they rarely say what should stop to make room. A capacity plan makes the impact visible so leadership can decide the trade-off deliberately.
• Use forward visibility to support the investment decision. Joe describes a healthcare IT department with $300 million allocated to its project portfolio. The team planned the technology, roles, funding and duration needed across the portfolio before taking it to the board; he says the board approved every project because the plan made the future investment and delivery requirements clear.
• Ask whether it is really a resource problem. If too many projects are let through, priorities are unclear or work is scheduled without regard to who can deliver it, better resource management will not fix the chaos. Capacity planning, prioritisation, budgeting and resource management are connected, and the fix often sits upstream.
• Fix priorities before adding headcount. Edita’s Bentley Systems support-service pilot began with managers reporting a resource problem. Root-cause work led first to changes in priorities, ways of working and governance; she reports an 85% improvement in response and resolution times during the pilot, with further investment in people and technology following as the work evolved.
• Keep replanning as reality changes. Estimates, priorities and available capacity do not stay fixed. The useful discipline is to revisit the plan as new information arrives and reconsider what the organisation can support and when.
• Start small and earn support through results. Edita recommends beginning with a focused pilot and scaling from demonstrated value, while the wider discussion stresses talking to executives about business outcomes rather than PMO process for its own sake.

The practical shift is upstream: instead of discovering resource conflicts after commitments have been made, give leadership enough forward visibility to decide what the organisation can realistically support before those conflicts become delivery problems.