Hi all! I’m looking for ideas on the best Airtable approach for combining a high-level project roadmap with team capacity planning.
I have a Master Projects table that brings together:
- Actual projects already assigned to the team
- Potential future projects that may be coming down the pipeline
Both use the same core fields, including Status, Assignee, Project Type, Product, Start Date, and Estimated Due Date. Potential work can represent either a specific expected resource or a larger initiative where we know significant work is coming but don’t yet know all of the individual deliverables.
The goal is primarily team-level, monthly planning: helping our manager see committed and potential work together, identify especially busy periods, and gauge whether we appear to have bandwidth for additional work.
I’ve tried Kanban, Timeline, and Roadmap Interface layouts, but none has felt quite “right” in terms of capturing both timing + workload. At this point, I also feel like I may be overthinking it and there’s probably a more straightforward in-platform solution that I’m just too lost in the sauce to see 😂
We also have an older Timeline utilization setup that uses each employee’s weekly availability, Project-level allocation hours, and Task-level utilization percentages. The Project allocation is currently standardized by Project Type, while the Task percentages are based on a rough effort rubric, so neither is especially precise. That setup was built a few years ago by someone who has since left the team and hasn’t really been maintained, so I’m open to modernizing it, potentially by using estimated task hours that roll up to the Project level, if that would better support this roadmap.
With all of that said, I’d love to hear what’s worked well for others doing similar portfolio/capacity planning in Airtable 🙏 For this type of use case, would you recommend:
- improving the existing Timeline/resource-allocation model,
- creating a dashboard with monthly workload metrics + project details,
- using estimated effort/hours and summarizing them over time,
- or structuring the roadmap differently?
Happy to share additional screenshots or details about the existing utilization setup if that would make it easier to advise. Thanks in advance! 🫶
