What is a allocation project / planning period?

Overview

A planning period (formerly known as an “allocation project”) is a time based container and supports company wide planning such as a QBR (Quarterly Business Review) or BRP (Big Room Planning) and stores data to specific periods to use in Planner and Forecast.

TeamForm allow planning periods to be configured independently based on your business planning cadence. Requests and approvals are made in anticipation for the next period’s commencement.

Outstanding requests or contention can be surfaced in the QBR market place. Planner can be configured to be locked down for periods or setup in a continuous planning manner. This will vary depending on your planning horizons and maturity of process (continuous being more mature in this case).

A single project often runs for 3 months or a quarter, every month, or a mixture of monthly, quarterly and beyond.

TeamForm typically sees having quarterly periods as a common pattern for customers with intermediate planning (known as real time allocations happening within the active window).

It is possible to make changes within an active project where the membership of people in teams appears different to what is in the baseline of the active project, this is typically to show a delta between reality and the original expected window.

It is possible to reconcile the current state of the system with the baseline through a manual baseline update, this is a more nuanced topic that will be covered in a specific page for more detail.

You can only have one active period in TeamForm, even if you have setup multiple periods.

In Planner, only the active period will be visible and used to store allocation data (demand requests, originating supply structures and approvals).
In Forecast it is possible to show as many periods as required (no hard limit), however there may be screen real estate challenges if too many are made visible at once.

Why are planning periods needed?

Provide process aligned communications in Planner and Forecast (e.g. to communicate to users the cut off dates for submissions)
Support customer defined configuration for process flow control, providing customer control over days worked, approval processes and much more.
Each planning period stores a single set of baseline data that is used in Planner for Point in Time (aka PiT) reference of team compositions (a point in time snapshot)
Each time box (or planning horizon) column created in Forecast is its own planning period.

Limitations

It is only possible to have one active allocation at any point in time
There is no way to automatically generate planning periods

How to create and configure a planning period (aka allocation project)

When should you create a new planning period?

Planning periods are typically created:

When the end date of the specified planning period is completed. For most of our customers this would be at the end of a quarter
When you need to define the Forecast time periods in the future for the Forecast module

FAQs

What configurations are allowed within an allocation project?

Rename of Planner column headings
Lock the Planner functionality to demand and supply leads
Communicate process specific announcements in Planner and Forecast rather than to all users
Demand requirements - this could be for roles, skills or other types of needs that can be defined as tagTypes / tags (configurable)
Set working days within the time period of duration this impacts the financial calculations if rate cards have been configured (by supply team)
Forecast specific settings such as skills level, confidence level, etc

What links an allocation project vs planning period vs baseline?

Planning period is the interval in which users plan and forecast. This interval / planning period is set within a planning period (aka allocation project).

Baseline is a specific point in time reference data of who’s in what and from where (the matrix intersection). This data is stored within a period, only one set of baseline data will be stored despite the system having the ability to recalculate baseline.

What is the difference between ‘active’ and ‘non-active’ allocation project?

The purpose of non active planning periods is to allow the storing of macro-allocation data (FTE numbers only) against the specified time period in the Forecast module.

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