Capacity planning in Wisegrid: workload vs real availability

The heatmap reads from the sheets you already run work in; it does not replace them. Each source sheet needs four columns so Wisegrid can place work on a timeline and total the load:

• Who: a Contact (or Contact list) column, for example Assigned to.
• When: two Date columns, Start and End. If the sheet already drives a Gantt view, these are the same date columns, ready to go.
• How much: a Number column for Effort. Per sheet, you choose whether effort means hours (an absolute number) or a percent of each person's daily capacity.

A row like "Homepage redesign, Dana, Jul 6 to Jul 17, 30h" is a demand statement the heatmap can place and total. Rows that have a person and effort but no dates are never invented onto the timeline; they surface in an Unscheduled tray instead, so phantom load cannot sneak in.

Resource planning lives at the project level because it spans all the project's sheets. Open the project and choose Resources from the project header, then click + New view and name it (for example "Design team, Q3"; a project can keep multiple named views).

In Configure sources, add each sheet whose assignments should roll in, and map its Assignee, Start, End, and Effort columns. Each dropdown only offers columns of an eligible type, so you cannot build a mapping the server will reject. Click Save sources and the heatmap builds immediately.

Resource planning is included in your plan (checked on the project owner's plan). Entering effort values on a sheet is normal editing; the cross-sheet rollup and availability profiles are included too.

Capacity, the denominator behind every color, comes from each person's availability profile. Click a person's name in the heatmap to open their editor and set:

• Work week: which days they work and how many hours per day.
• Part time: a fraction of the full week (0.6 means 60 percent), optionally only within a start and end window.
• Holidays: the workspace's shared holidays, plus any extra non-working dates.
• Time off: date-range blocks that drop capacity to zero, or to reduced hours for partial leave.

A live "typical week" preview updates as you type, so you see the effect before saving. Availability is keyed to an email address, not an account: external contractors and vendors get full profiles and appear in the heatmap without ever becoming a login or a billable seat.

The heatmap is people as rows, time as columns, and utilization as color: green is comfortably under capacity (up to about 85 percent), amber is approaching full, red is over 100 percent, and a hatched cell means zero capacity with no work assigned (a day off or leave). Work scheduled on a day someone has zero capacity is always red, never hidden.

Click any cell for the detail popover: allocated versus available hours, the exact utilization ("102.5h allocated / 40h available, 256%"), and a per-day breakdown of what drove the overload. Zoom between Day, Week, and Month; sort people by most loaded; or filter to one person. When a row assigns several people, its effort splits evenly by default, and you can pin any person's share to override the split.

Two rollups close the loop. First, dashboards have a dedicated Resource heatmap widget: embed the availability view you just built directly on a dashboard canvas, next to the numbers your stakeholders already watch.

Second, for the demand side, build a report across your source sheets (Reports pull rows from many sheets in one project into a single live view) and group it, for example summing Effort by assignee or by sheet. Reports are gated by your role on the project, not by plan tier. Metric and chart widgets can then source from that report, so a "total planned hours" KPI and a per-person bar chart sit beside the embedded heatmap, all updating live as the sheets change.