Resource Planning for Architecture Practices

What resource planning means in a practice

Resource planning is deciding, a few weeks ahead, who will work on which project and for how many hours, then checking that against the people the practice actually has. In an architecture practice it links three things: deadlines, stage fees and the team.

Without a plan, resourcing happens in corridors. A director promises a planning submission for the end of the month, a project architect discovers two colleagues are on leave that week, and the practice ends up paying for overtime or missing the date. The fee for that stage was set months ago, so every extra hour comes straight off the margin.

A useful plan answers four questions every week:

• Capacity: how many hours each person can give to project work, after leave and non-project time.
• Demand: how many hours each live project needs, stage by stage, to hit its next milestone.
• Pipeline: which likely wins will need people, and when.
• Gap: where demand runs ahead of capacity, or capacity sits idle, and what to do about it.

Eight to twelve weeks is a practical horizon for most small and mid-sized practices. It is long enough to recruit a freelancer, move a deadline or bring a stage forward, and short enough that the numbers are still worth believing.

Work out real capacity first

Capacity is the hours a person can spend on project work, which is always less than their contracted hours. Planning against contracted hours is the most common reason resource plans look fine and projects still run late.

Start with contracted hours for the week, take off booked leave and bank holidays, then take off the time each role spends on non-project work: practice administration, bids, training, mentoring and marketing. A director who spends half the week winning work has roughly half a week of project capacity.

Contracted

A project architect on 37.5 hours a week.

Leave

One day of booked leave this week: 7.5 hours off, leaving 30.

Non-project

About 4 hours on CPD, a bid and internal meetings, leaving 26.

Plannable

26 hours of project capacity this week. Plan to roughly 90% of it, about 23 hours, to leave room for the unexpected.

The figures above are illustrative. The principle is to plan against the hours that are genuinely available and to keep a small buffer, because site queries, client calls and drawing revisions always arrive unplanned. For more on how available hours relate to billable time, see our guide to utilisation rates.

Build demand from stage budgets

The best source of demand is the hours budget for each stage, spread across the weeks until its next milestone. If the practice already budgets stages from the fee, the resource plan is mostly a matter of putting those hours on a calendar.

Take the hours left in each live stage, subtract what has already been logged, and spread the remainder over the weeks to the deadline. Then split it by role: a Stage 4 technical package needs more project architect and technologist time than director time, while Stage 2 is usually heavier on design leads.

Allocate people to stages, not just projects

An allocation such as "Priya, Elm Court, 3 days" is better than nothing, but "Priya, Elm Court Stage 4, 22 hours" connects to the fee. When timesheets are also coded by stage, the practice can compare planned hours with logged hours each week and see whether a stage is drifting. Our guide on tracking time against RIBA stages covers that side.

Include work you have not won yet

A plan that shows only signed projects will always look like the practice has spare capacity. Likely wins need a place in the plan, marked as tentative and weighted by how likely they are.

Give each opportunity in the pipeline an expected start date, an hours estimate for its first stage and a probability. Show it on the plan in a different state from confirmed work. A simple weighting, such as multiplying the hours by the chance of winning, gives a sensible figure for planning totals, while the full hours show what would happen if it lands.

For an illustrative example: an opportunity needing 120 hours of Stage 2 work, judged at a 50% chance of winning, adds 60 weighted hours to the plan for the weeks it would run. If it is confirmed, the full 120 hours replace the weighted figure and someone is named.

Run a 30-minute weekly resourcing meeting

The plan is only as good as the conversation that keeps it current. A short, fixed weekly meeting with project leads is what turns a spreadsheet into decisions.

1. One owner.A practice manager or director keeps the plan and chairs the meeting.
2. Plan in hours.Days hide part-time staff and split weeks. Hours add up.
3. Protect focus.Try to keep people on two or three projects at once rather than five.
4. Plan leave early.Ask for summer and Christmas leave months ahead, then plan around it.
5. Close the loop.If a stage keeps needing more people than planned, raise it as a fee or scope question.

Questions practices ask

Short answers to the resourcing questions practice managers and directors ask most.

How far ahead should an architecture practice plan resources?

Eight to twelve weeks suits most small and mid-sized practices. Plan the next two weeks by named person and the rest by role, and review the whole plan weekly.

How do you calculate capacity for architects?

Start with contracted hours, take off booked leave and bank holidays, then take off regular non-project time such as bids, training and administration. Plan to about 90% of what remains so there is room for unplanned work.

Should resource planning be done in days or hours?

Hours are more accurate, because they handle part-time staff, half days and split weeks and they connect directly to stage budgets and timesheets. Days are easier to talk about, so many practices discuss in days and record in hours.

How do you plan for projects you have not won yet?

Add likely work as tentative, with an expected start date, an hours estimate and a probability. Use weighted hours for planning totals and keep tentative work visibly separate from confirmed projects.

Can we do resource planning in a spreadsheet?

Yes, and many practices start that way. Spreadsheets become hard to maintain once they need to reflect live timesheets, leave and stage budgets at the same time, which is when practices usually move to software that holds all three.

Where Avoice fits

Avoice puts resource planning in the same system as stage fees, timesheets and the pipeline, so the plan updates from real data instead of a separate spreadsheet.

People and staffing in Avoice shows each person's capacity, utilisation and allocation by project. Projects carry RIBA stages with fees and hours budgets, and timesheets roll up against those stages, so planned and actual hours sit side by side. In clients and CRM, a deal is priced by stage, team and hours, and winning it pre-fills the project's stages, fees and hours budget, ready to be allocated.

To see your own team planned against live projects, book a demo.