How to Understand if Your Resources are Overloaded or Underloaded?

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No one doubts the importance of this question because a properly distributed workload helps to increase the productivity of the resources and boost the working process. 

Managers always worry whether the people are overloaded as it gives an impact on their efficiency at work... but what about work underload? It is also considered an undesirable factor,  because underloaded resources become very passive, unmotivated, and, as a result, less effective.

Jira mostly focuses on the Projects but has hardly any feature when it comes to Resource Planning & Tracking, so additional plugins are needed to solve this. One of such plugins is ActivityTimeline that provides a clear picture of who is doing what, when, and how long. The app visualizes the workflow on the Individual and Team timelines, provides various reports for better analysis and planning. 

Teams’ and Individual Workloads

The plugin provides a great feature for resource planning objectives - workload indicator. Users can see it on Teams’ and Individual levels or the combined one. 

The indicator clearly shows the workload distribution of multiple teams for long and short terms, so managers can plan future work for their teams in a few clicks. With the help of the application, users can effortlessly observe the teams’ availability and evenly distribute big chunks of work among them. 

It is not uncommon that the team as a whole may seem Underloaded, but when you go into details you see that there is a clear discrepancy on the individual level, that’s where ActivityTimeline comes in handy. With its help Manager goes into detail and discovers an unpleasant situation - some users are overloaded and can’t cope with work, while others lack tasks, become unmotivated, and do not use their full potential.

In this case, the Manager, with the help of the plugin, fixes the situation by equal workload distribution on general and more detailed levels. As a result -  there is no need to give more tasks to the whole team, as the problem was on the individual level.

Workload Reports for Teams, Users, and Projects 

ActivityTimeline also offers great reporting features for better workload management. Workload reports are quite flexible and allow you to choose different scopes, teams, and users, specify the exact projects. 

Report per individual user helps to see a detailed picture of your team members' load. You can also generate reports for the whole team to get a general overview of their workload.

Bookmark your favorite reports, share them with other users, and export to Excel files if needed. 

Always remember, that both over- and underload negatively affect the inner processes and it’s important to maintain the golden mean for the teams’ convenience and efficiency. ActivityTimeline will definitely help to keep the resources’ workflow constantly balanced. 

Clear vision and simplicity of use is the best formula of the efficient work process.

Check out our Blog page and discover more useful tips for your advanced planning.