Evaluating capacity planning for a marketing department

Evaluate capacity planning by checking whether campaign demand fits the people, skills and time actually available. Include campaign peaks and always-on work, then examine bottlenecks such as creative production, design, copy, legal review and campaign operations. Total team hours can hide a shortage in a role that only one part of delivery depends on.

For each planning period, start with available work hours after planned absences and non-project work. Account for always-on activity either as its own demand or as time reserved from capacity, not both; then compare it with campaign estimates by person and role. Keep working schedules and relevant skills visible in the calculation.

Use hours or FTE consistently when comparing capacity with demand. Adobe Workfront’s Resource Planner supports budgeting in hours, FTE or cost, while task count alone treats a brief review like a substantial design task. If estimates use another effort measure, check that managers can still compare workloads consistently.

Run three scenarios in each candidate: one person split across campaigns, a planned absence, and a late urgent request. Check whether the forecast reflects each change, shows any role-level clash, and lets a manager see assignments across projects and rebalance work.

Compare candidates using the same scenarios. Adobe Workfront is positioned for marketers, while Float is positioned for creative agencies. For each, verify whether managers can see campaign peaks alongside recurring work, identify constrained roles, and understand what changes when new work arrives.

In Adobe Workfront, resource budgeting is available in the Resource Planner’s Project or Role view. Budgets can be entered as hours, FTE or cost; user budgeted hours can also be set from planned hours, and Role Budgeted Hours can be calculated as the sum of users’ budgeted hours.

Check access before treating Workfront’s budgeting views as available to the team. Its documented requirements name any Adobe Workfront licence, Standard Plan, Edit access to Resource Management, and permissions for the projects and users being budgeted. Budgeting by cost additionally requires Edit access to Financial Data, including Edit Cost Rates and Edit General Finance.

A forecast is more useful when its assumptions are visible: working schedules, absences, always-on work, campaign estimates and any missing estimates. Record limitations in the capacity report, especially where missing effort data could conceal a bottleneck. Use the forecast to decide what to delay or outsource, rather than treating a colour-coded full-utilisation view as proof that delivery is feasible.

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