BigTime’s Planning Board is designed to give you more power over your resource allocation data. It’s more than just a spreadsheet – it’s a visualization tool that can give you deep insight into your resource planning trends at a glance. One of the ways it does this is by arranging your data into two donut charts at the top of your screen. This article will walk you through how those charts work, and what they can tell you about your firm’s approach to allocations.
Planning Board Charts
The two donut charts at the top of your screen are labeled UNDER ALLOCATED and OVER ALLOCATED. Each one displays a percent value, calculated based on the number of either under or over allocated staffers during the time frame and period selected on the left side of your window. When you set a different time frame or date for your chart, the numbers in your donut charts will recalculate to reflect the data for those periods.
Next, let’s take a look at how the percent values in each chart are calculated.
% Under Allocated
This represents the number of staffers that are allocated below their set hourly capacity. To get this percent value, BigTime takes the total number of the staffers displayed on your Planning Board and divides them by the number of under-allocated staffers. As an example, let's say you have 50 total staffers displayed on your Planning Board, eight of whom are under allocated. This would mean that the percent on your UNDER ALLOCATED donut chart would be 16%.
% Over Allocated
The OVER ALLOCATED donut chart displays the percentage of your staffers that are allocated above their set capacity. To illustrate: if you have 50 total staffers displayed on your board, and four of them are over allocated, the percentage in the OVER ALLOCATED chart would be 8%.
Each donut chart takes into account the numbers from all six periods displayed on your Planning Board table. So if, for example, one of your staffers is over allocated for five periods, but under allocated for one, they would be factored into the UNDER ALLOCATED chart. This is because their total allocations for all six time periods will still fall below their capacity for those same time periods.
You can also click on each of the donut charts to filter out certain staffers from the Planning Board. In the example below, we clicked on the UNDER ALLOCATED donut chart. After doing so, BigTime filtered out all our over allocated staffers, so we will only see our under allocated staffers in our table.
If you want to reset your Planning Board view, all you need to do is click the CLEAR FILTERS button located in your filters sidebar.
Now that you understand what the charts on your Planning Board represent, you can take a look at some of the other Planning Board articles to further familiarize yourself with this feature.