MyPlateTM provides a visual environment to describe capacity and workload in a single display that is easy to grasp and memorize. All projects assigned to a person are depicted as rectangles on the background of a square which represents a person’s capacity during Baseline period. A Baseline period is typically one week (40 hours), or a month (160 hours), or a year (2080 hours), or any other customizable number of hours set by the user. Once the Baseline period is selected, each project hours expected to be contributed to this project shall be estimated over the same period. E.g., if baseline is set to 40 hours (week), all projects entered will need hours estimate on a weekly basis.
MyPlateTM can also represent a workload-capacity view for the entire team. In such a case, the baseline period (capacity) would be a sum of all team members capacity (hours), and project hours will be a sum of hours expected from each member. E.g. 3 member team normal capacity on a weekly basis would be 120 hours (assuming 40 hours week), Project 1 workload is 50 hours (2 members have to spend 50% of their time during next week on this project, hence 40 hours total, plus 3rd member will have to contribute 10 hours), Project 2 workload is 60 hours (same 2 members will spend the rest of their time (40 hours) on this project, plus the 3rd member will spend 20 hours; Project 3 requires 30 hours, which means that the team will need 20 hours of “extra capacity” to complete all three projects. Assuming none of this projects can be delayed, the team will have either to work overtime or ask for help from outside the team. MyPlateTM will visually depict such potential “overload” by showing projects’ total area extending beyond Capacity square and calculating Available Capacity as a negative number (in our example it will be “– 17%”, which can be interpreted as amount of overtime/help needed).
Whether it is a “plate” of an individual contributor or a team, MyPlateTM is very effective for communicating your current work situation to your manager and can greatly facilitate a workload management conversation to decide on priorities, identify if help is needed, or make commitments to work on additional projects. A well balanced workload is a critical element of employee moral, job satisfaction, productivity improvements and work related stress reduction.
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