Resource allocation forecasting

The situation

Allocating projects across delivery engineers was done on judgement and recollection. That works until the year is halfway through and it becomes clear that three people are underwater in the same quarter while capacity sits idle elsewhere. By then the only lever left is overtime.

The manager’s question was simple and had no available answer: what does next year actually look like for each person?

What we built

A forecasting model built on the annual work bank.

• Projected workload is calculated per person across the year, not per project.
• Complexity is an input parameter, so a demanding job and a routine one of the same nominal size do not read as equivalent load.
• Reallocations can be modelled before they are made. Move a project, see what it does to both people, decide, then commit.

The result

The team can see peaks and troughs ahead of time and flatten them deliberately. That is a resourcing outcome, but the reason it matters is narrower than that: sustained overload is how good engineers burn out, and this makes overload visible early enough to prevent rather than manage.