Resource forecasting 101: how to make accurate project predictions (without a crystal ball)

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Key takeaways:

• Accurate resource forecasting is a necessity for successful project execution and profitability
• Forecasting is unclear when capacity information is scattered across different sources, like spreadsheets, project management tools, and personal calendars
• A dedicated resource management tool that stores all current and historical capacity data makes for easier and more accurate resource forecasting

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When your team is juggling multiple projects with several more in the pipeline, resource planning is anything but predictable. Most of your time is probably spent pondering impossible questions like:

• Can your team handle the three new projects that just dropped on your lap?
• Do you have the necessary budget to execute upcoming projects?
• Will the right resources for a project be available when they’re eventually needed?

To answer all three, you don’t need to see into the future—you just need resource forecasting.

What is resource forecasting?

Resource forecasting is a method of predicting and planning for future resource needs to deliver a project successfully. Together with resource management techniques like resource leveling and smoothing, it’s a crucial step in the resource management process that helps project, resource, and traffic managers understand future project requirements and ensure projects remain on budget. 

At its most basic level, forecasting involves: 

• Assessing upcoming projects
• Determining resource requirements
• Comparing requirements with current resource availability

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Jacquie Ford

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Head of Consumer Operations at News Corp

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If you’re looking to move away from a reactive workflow, you should have a plan that maps capacity for at least three to six months ahead. This will help you mitigate resourcing risks and understand how to better prioritize where your team is spending their time.

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A real-life resource forecasting example: Atlassian

Atlassian is a global enterprise software company building products for developers, project managers, and content managers. Senior Creative Resource Manager Emily Feliciano oversees resource allocation for Atlassian’s 50+ in-house creative team. 

A critical part of her process is accurate resource forecasting: when new projects are in the pipeline, Feliciano’s first step is conducting tentative planning in her resource management tool, Float (that’s us! 👋).

Here’s what the forecasting process looks like:

• As soon as a new project is on the horizon, Feliciano spends time assessing both the complexity and true workload behind it for a more accurate estimate of the amount of effort (read: time) required
• She then sets up the project in her resource management software before it’s confirmed, labeling it as ‘Tentative’ so it doesn’t impact existing project schedules
• Finally, she allocates work using placeholder roles—staging deliverables that will be later moved to team members—to simulate real resource plans and get an idea of the required skills

By creating tentative projects, scheduling them, and setting all their phases, milestones, and resources, Feliciano quickly sees if the right resources with the right skills will be available when needed, helping her prevent resource overallocation in the upcoming weeks and months—and giving her ample time to source additional hands if needed.

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Keep capacity data in one central place

Get a bird’s-eye view of your team’s time, skills, and profitability with live insights on resource capacity to make forecasting more accurate than ever.

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5 steps in the resource forecasting process

The forecasting process can be broken down into five steps, broken down below in detail:

1. Define your upcoming project pipeline

Tentatively list all potential projects—prioritized based on urgency and strategic importance—along with essential details like scope and project timelines, and input this information in a central place, like a spreadsheet or resource management tool (no prize for guessing which option we prefer 👀)

🔥 In fact, our hot take is that a lack of forecasting clarity most often stems from decentralized resource scheduling and isolated planning, where information about team members’ true capacity is scattered across a medley of disconnected sources like project management software, Slack threads, personal calendars, and spreadsheets.

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Pro tip: proactively gather the information you need

Up-to-date information about new work won’t always fall into your lap—you’ll likely need to go out and get it. If you work in an agency or professional services business, regularly consult your sales department or project managers to find out what deals are in the pipeline. 

Or, if you know your company aims to 10x its revenue over the next five years, you can probably deduce that more work will soon be on its way—and that means it’s time to start planning staffing requests or building a solid freelance roster to meet resource requirements.

Finally, having all your capacity data in a resource management tool means you have instant access to the information you could possibly need about past, current, and future projects, helping you make informed forecasting decisions.

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2. Estimate the effort needed to complete the work

Look into your historical data to find out how long similar projects took, and ask team members who’ve worked on projects like these before. You should also tap into your own knowledge: as the resident people planning pro, you likely have a pretty good idea of the true workload behind specific allocations.

By considering all these factors, you’ll have a realistic estimate of the time and future resource needs to complete a project smoothly.

A resource management tool can also go a long way in informing your estimations by giving you access to data about previous projects and the amount of time they required.

For example, in Float, you can view any date range—like today, the upcoming week, or the previous month—to see resource utilization in hours or percentage for each team member and make educated assumptions on future resource demand based on these insights.

3. Compare your project estimates with resource availability

When a project comes in, you might not know exactly who is going to take it on right away—but you do know what the required skills and roles will be.

Check who’s available during the projected timeframe and whether their skills match the project’s resource requirements. Depending on the project’s scope and duration, you might need to consider growing your team or bringing on a contractor if there’s a mismatch.

👆 Remember: if you’re using resource management software, you don’t have to have all the answers right now. You can add placeholder roles and assign people once the project is confirmed, or assign resources as ‘tentative’.

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Angela Faunce Leaf

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Executive Producer of Integrated Production at Tilt Creative + Production

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Within Float, we have a number of ‘Unassigned’ project resources we use as placeholders for projects that are still in the bidding stage, or not fully scoped or scheduled yet.‍

Similarly, for known repeats, we will book the appropriate folks but keep as ‘tentative’ until full details are known. An example of this might be recurring work around the holidays for a retail client.

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4. Validate and refine your project estimates

Capacity management is a team sport, so involving others in your planning process is crucial. 

Once you have a clear idea of who might be available to take on an upcoming project, speak with team members and leads to confirm their interest and availability. You might find out the senior copywriter currently marked as ‘available’ for the massive project kicking off in two months is actually planning to schedule two weeks of PTO right in the middle of it. 

‍Getting input from everyone involved ensures that your project estimates are as close as possible to realistic and that your plan can accommodate surprises along the way. 

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Emily Feliciano

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Senior Creative Resource Manager at Atlassian

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You can’t be too precious with outcomes because inevitably something will shift, whether that’s a new higher-paying client taking priority, turnover in the org, or changes in deliverables. You have to be flexible.

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5. Finalize your plan and get approval

Do a final sweep for discrepancies between your planned work and available resources. Spotting these gaps early gives you a headstart in identifying the necessary steps to bridge them—like needing additional budget to hire more staff.

For more accurate resource forecasting, use your resource management tool to view historical data.

5 challenges of resource forecasting (and tactical advice to resolve them)

When you’re forecasting resources for dozens—or even hundreds—of dispersed team members with varying skill sets and availability, you’re bound to run into a few issues. Luckily, with the right forecasting process, every problem has a solution 👇

1. Little awareness of individual team members’ strengths

🤔 Problem: lacking visibility into your team’s skill sets, interests, and career goals makes it virtually impossible to optimize resource allocation in your team. ‍

💡 Solution: build relationships with your team members to understand both what they’re good at and what they enjoy, so you’ll have specific people in mind for future allocations. Bonus tip: track your team’s skills in resource management and capacity planning software like Float. That way, you’ll have a trackable skills database enabling you to filter team members by skill and find the perfect person for a project every time.

2. No visibility into current capacity

🤔 Problem: scrambling to forecast resources at the last minute results in making major, real-time staffing decisions that could become costly mistakes.

💡 Solution: integrate resource forecasting into your resource management plan to optimize processes. By understanding the scope of upcoming work, you can appropriately allocate staff from your existing team or through new hires. In this way, forecasting eliminates rushed decision-making and contributes to smoother project execution—and fewer bottlenecks.

3. Lack of cross-team communication and updates

🤔 Problem: people’s availability changes like the tides—all it takes is a sick day or an unexpected all-hands workshop to throw availability into disarray.

‍💡 Solution: keep communication lines open with your team through regular capacity planning meetings and one-on-one chats that give them recurring opportunities to communicate and adjust workloads. You might also have discussions with team members’ managers and other project stakeholders to keep everyone aligned.

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Pro tip: choose a meeting cadence that works for you

Depending on the nature of your business and project requirements, you may need to meet with team members on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis to spot bottlenecks.

Global agency Scholz & Friends holds weekly meetings to monitor resource capacity in Float, while consultancy firm Accounts and Legal conducts monthly sessions to review team members’ workloads against their actual capacity. If your team uses the agile methodology and plans work in sprints, this process should ideally happen at bi-weekly intervals.

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4. Insufficient data to drive decision-making

🤔 Problem: if your resource forecasts are somewhat subjective and not backed by data from previous projects—especially when undertaking unfamiliar projects for unfamiliar clients with a brand-new team—your forecasting is bound to be inaccurate.

💡 Solution: collect and analyze performance data like resource utilization rates, scheduled hours, logged hours, and overtime to refine future estimates as your project progresses. Pro tip: automate this process by using a dedicated resource management tool that gives you easy access to historical data for any time period. You can refer back to previous project records to learn from your past mistakes (and successes).

5. Lack of alignment among stakeholders

🤔 Problem: even when you have a resource forecast in place for future projects, it can still be challenging to act on your plan when there’s a lack of alignment among various stakeholders.

‍💡 Solution: actively involve key decision-makers when examining resource forecasts to bridge this gap. These people might include people ops teams responsible for hiring decisions, managers with budget authority, and people overseeing project planning and management. Their combined insights will translate your forecasts into practical, effective plans capable of increasing profitability.

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Pro tip: help stakeholders get to the information they need faster

As a people planner, you know exactly where to go for the insights you need—but this isn’t always true for stakeholders.

If you use a resource management tool like Float (and not a multi-tab spreadsheet only three people can make sense of), you can save tailored views and share them with relevant stakeholders. This way, everyone can access a quick overview of the data that matters to them.

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5 transformative benefits of resource forecasting

1. Improved strategic alignment: effective resource forecasting gives you a clear view of the project pipeline, ensuring that project selection and prioritization align with your organization’s strategy
2. Efficient resource utilization: forecasting helps teams identify periods of high and low resource demand, enabling efficient allocation and scheduling and, as a result, less burnout
3. Better employee engagement: thoughtful forecasting considers employees’ career goals when assigning projects, which boosts engagement and reduces staff turnover, lowering costs in the long run
4. Increased financial responsibility: forecasting encourages financial responsibility by offering insights into anticipated revenue, guiding operational decisions, and informing spending‍
5. Proactive staffing decisions: good forecasting allows ample time for making crucial staffing decisions and creating contingency plans based on anticipated project needs

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Clara Tooth

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Former Manager at Accounts and Legal

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When planning in Float, we could see that there were more and more clients, and things were getting tighter. That expressed the need to recruit for a specific skill. Without Float, we wouldn’t have been able to find the right talent.

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[fs-toc-omit]Start seeing into the future 🔮

Planning ahead isn’t easy, but with the right tools and processes—and a proactive approach—you can accurately predict what resources you’ll need, avoid those stressful last-minute scrambles, and keep projects running smoothly.

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Resource planning made simple

Forecast and allocate resources and keep track of project timelines and billable hours, all in one place.

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📚 Everything else you need to know about resource planning

Forecasting is just one part of the resource planning process—we have a lot more to share with you: 👇

• The ultimate guide to all things resource planning, with steps to create a plan of your own
• A handpicked list of seven free resource planning templates to use right away
• Practical resource allocation tactics to deliver projects on time without causing burnout
• Resource loading best practices to keep team members’ utilization at healthy rates
• Steps to build a solid resource scheduling process for visibility into your team’s time

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