Resource Planning for Multiple Projects: 4-Step Process

As your business scales and your team takes on more clients, you need to adapt your resource planning methods. 

Why?

Because the approach that helped you manage one project won’t be as effective when juggling 10 or 100.

With a system that supports resource planning for multiple projects, you can thoughtfully assign people, tools, and budgets—without worrying about overwork, project delays, or cost overruns. And still keep your margins up.

Here’s our four-step process to manage resources for multiple projects:

Step 1: Create a centralized resource calendar for all projects

Start by compiling a list of all your team members and their assignments. Add them to a single calendar view so you can see everyone’s schedules and availability in one place.

This quick visibility is key when managing many clients and projects. It helps you prevent double-booking, which can lead to last-minute staffing scrambles that delay other projects across your portfolio.

And a single calendar also makes it easier to maintain a balanced, 70-80% resource utilization rate for your team. Which is important because:

• When you overutilize employees, you cause burnout and jeopardize work quality
• When you underutilize employees, productivity and revenue drop and your profit margins suffer

Many professional services firms start off using a spreadsheet as their resource calendar. 

But when you’re working with more than one client or managing multiple projects, spreadsheets become more of a headache than a help.

Why?

Because they require manual setup, data entry, and project planning. All of these steps create extra admin tasks, taking away time you could spend on billable work or client acquisition.

Plus, spreadsheets lack built-in resource planning and project management capabilities. Like automatically tracking employee availability, task completion, and project progress.

Resource management software like Scoro helps you seamlessly manage multiple projects and clients.

So you always know who’s available and can assign tasks based on real-time bandwidth, getting appropriate coverage while keeping workloads balanced.

Scoro’s “Bookings” module shows all your team members’ utilization rates in a portfolio-level view, allowing you to quickly assess bookings across projects, teams, and roles.

This heatmap’s color coding makes it easy to check availability at a glance:

• Green indicates booked time, including confirmed (solid) and tentative (striped) bookings
• White reflects available time (i.e., less than 100% utilization)
• Red means the team member is overbooked (i.e., over 100% utilization)

You can refine the chart further by using the “Grouped by:” menu and selecting “Roles.” Now, you can see availability for different roles, such as copywriters, consultants, strategists, or developers.

Say you’re scoping a project that requires a strategy expert for 10 hours per week in Q2. A quick glance at the “Bookings” module shows that Amy, your top strategist, is only at 30-40% capacity during that time. So you could confidently book her for the project.

Step 2: Forecast and plan resources for upcoming projects

Before you take on additional projects or clients, you need to know if you have the right resources to handle more work. 

Enter capacity planning.

Capacity planning helps you assess upcoming projects, forecast future workloads, and define resource needs.

When you know resource requirements upfront, it’s easier to make realistic project plans for the next few months or quarters. So you avoid overbooking your current team or making promises you can’t actually keep (like meeting certain deadlines). 

And you can make strategic decisions on when to hire new employees or outsource work—well before projects begin.

Still, it’s important to note that resource forecasting and planning can be time-intensive. So only use these tactics when you’re confident a project will move forward.

Use Scoro’s “Pipeline” view to identify deals that are likely to close soon. Focus on projects that have moved past the opportunity stage and into the scoping or proposal stage.

Then, build a resource breakdown structure (RBS) for these projects.

An RBS defines the roles, skill sets, hours, and budget you need to complete a project.

So you can ensure you have enough coverage, tools, and money allocated before you begin the project.

Say you’re scoping a marketing strategy project for a potential client.

Your RBS would include:

• The departments involved in the project, like consulting and strategy
• The people needed for the work, like a lead consultant and strategy expert
• The time required to complete the project, like 20 hours per week for four weeks
• Any software your team needs, like Tableau and HubSpot
• The budget for specific deliverables (e.g., $6,800 for strategy and $6,000 for consulting and the total project (e.g., $12,800)

Then, use Scoro’s “Quote builder” to create your RBS framework. 

Input the roles you identified and the hours you estimated to create the RBS framework:

• Add each deliverable under the “Product | Description” subheading
• Input the time for each deliverable under the “Quantity” and “Unit” subheadings
• Select a department or specific person under the “Cost and provider info” subheading for each deliverable

Scoro lets you easily scope the project, check your team’s capacity, and incorporate your RBS into the project planning process.

To continue your proactive planning, turn high-probability deals into projects. Click the “Create project” button.

Give the project a name and click “Save.” Then, Scoro will automatically create tentative bookings for each role or team member in the project’s “Bookings” tab.

From here, you can click the user icon next to the role placeholder to assign the project to a specific team member.

Step 3: Balance workloads across the team

Instead of consistently overbooking certain employees (i.e., highly experienced senior team members), look for ways to more evenly distribute workloads across each role or department. 

This resource scheduling approach helps everyone perform their best.

Why?

Because it prevents you from assigning too many projects to employees, which can cause costly burnout. A recent Gallup report found that burnout costs companies $322 billion in turnover and lost productivity in a single year.

Balancing workloads also helps you avoid underutilizing employees. Which, besides limiting opportunities to bring in revenue, tends to decrease engagement and lower morale.

And this disengagement can be more expensive than you might think.

Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that 62% of employees report not being engaged at work, causing a loss of $8.9 trillion in global GDP.

As we mentioned before, the aim is to achieve a 70-80% utilization rate for individual contributors.

This lets your team maximize billable utilization while still allowing for some flexibility and time for necessary admin work.

Use the heatmap in Scoro’s “Bookings” module to identify overbooked employees. Look for red areas that reflect employees who are over 100% capacity. And anyone over 80% utilization.

Click any heatmap area to see a detailed workload breakdown. Including the number of fixed and tentative hours for each booked project.

Besides utilization rates, you can also view availability by remaining hours. Just open the “Heatmap” menu and select “Remaining hours.”

Say your senior designer, John, is overbooked. He’s over 100% capacity and doesn’t have room to take on the new website redesign project you tentatively assigned.

But junior designer Megan has 40 hours per week available during the project timeline. While she doesn’t have as much experience as John, taking on this project will let her upskill. Which helps you strengthen your in-house bench and helps her develop professionally.

To transfer the project to Megan, you’d: 

1. Click on John’s workload breakdown 
2. Click to open the website redesign project
3. Select the website redesign booking and click John’s profile picture to modify the booking
4. Select Megan from the list and click “Save.”

Now, when you go back to the “Bookings” view, you’ll see that no one on your design team is overbooked. And both John and Megan still have time available for additional client projects.

Step 4: Monitor and adjust resources in real time

Project resource management isn’t a one-time task. Instead, it requires ongoing checks and adjustments.

Keep an eye on team utilization throughout the project lifecycle. This way, you can proactively reallocate resources as needed. Rather than letting issues stack up and impact both project delivery and your margins.

With continuous resource tracking, you can easily identify and address:

• Underutilization: Can happen when a project phase gets delayed and the deliverable timeline shifts, unexpectedly lowering billable time
• Overutilization: Can occur when the scope expands and your team needs more time than expected to certain deliverables or phases. Which can create bottlenecks, cause missed deadlines, and potentially delay other projects.

Say senior consultant Beth and junior strategist Ali are assigned to a consulting project.

However, scope creep increases Ali’s project hours by 25% and causes her project phase to last two weeks longer than planned. Which delays the start date for Beth’s phase.

After rescoping the project and adjusting the timeline, you might assign Beth to another consulting project scheduled during Ali’s strategy phase. This will help you increase Beth’s utilization rate and maintain your profit margin.

You might also revisit other project timelines that the schedule change could affect.

For example, you could reassign Beth’s next scheduled project to an available junior consultant to avoid overbooking her or creating additional delays for other clients.

To monitor and adjust team assignments in real-time, check Scoro’s Utilization report. Select the “Tasks and time entries” option from the “Utilization” menu to view both assigned tasks and tracked time.

Green reflects utilized time below 100%, while red indicates over 100% utilization. White means available time.

Hover over any employee’s utilized hours to see which tasks take up their time. As well as a breakdown of their scheduled, unscheduled, and completed hours.

If you notice any red flags, click on the project name to open it and access more details on timelines and deliverable statuses. This will help you make informed decisions about adjusting workloads.

To get more granular utilization insights, use the Utilization report’s filters. For instance, you can use the “Role” filter to look for patterns among specific groups of employees. Such as frequent overutilization of senior designers and underutilization among junior designers.

Or filter by project tags to look for utilization trends in certain types of projects. Which can help you allocate resources more effectively as you plan similar projects in the future.

Simplify resource planning with Scoro 

Without the right tools, it’s challenging to handle multiple projects simultaneously and maximize your team’s time and talent. 

Take Design de Plume. The creative agency initially had limited visibility into team utilization, which meant the team often assigned projects to anyone with room on their calendar.

But after switching to Scoro, Design de Plume was able to schedule work based on availability and skills—and proactively adjust assignments. This led to a 20% increase in project profitability for the agency.

Want to manage your resources in real time, have happier employees, more satisfied clients, and greater profitability? Try Scoro for free for 14 days to see how we can help you achieve these goals.