Labor Activity Over/Under Allocation Analysis

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Important: Available with the Apptio Planning Standard subscription
Remember: Integrated Investment Planning (IIP) feature is enabled

Allocated labor often represents a significant portion of a project or investment’s total expense. Understanding how labor is utilized is essential for assessing available capacity vs. demand, making hiring decisions, determining when to pause or stop non-critical projects, and identifying underutilized resources whose capacity can be better allocated elsewhere.

In many organizations, the resource cost center differs from the project cost center, and a single labor resource may support multiple projects. This makes capacity planning more complex and can lead to:
  • Under-allocation, where valuable capacity is lost
  • Over-allocation, which causes project delays and misrepresents actual resource availability
  • Difficulty assessing total demand for key roles vs. available capacity
  • Challenges estimating labor funding needs during budgeting

Integrated Investment Planning (IIP) addresses these challenges by providing controls to either prevent resource over-allocation entirely or to define custom over- and under-allocation thresholds. These thresholds make it easy to identify labor assignments that exceed or fall short of acceptable limits, ensuring accurate capacity forecasting and more effective labor planning across the organization.

Enable Labor Activity Planning and Allocation Settings

  1. Navigate to Administration Settings (Gear icon) → Company Profile.
  2. Ensure Integrated Investment Planning (IIP) is enabled first—Labor Activity cannot be activated without it.
  3. Enable Labor Activity.
  4. Choose whether to prevent over-allocation or allow over-allocation of labor resources.
    1. Prevent Over Allocation: The system will block allocations that exceed available resource capacity.
    2. Allow Over Allocation: The system will allow allocations above capacity.
  5. If over-allocation is allowed, specify the percentage of over/under allocation permitted.

    Once enabled, the Labor Activity tab becomes available for planning project labor.

Enable Labor Allocation Analysis

Requires:New Expenses Experience Page enabled

  1. Navigate to Expenses → Labor Activity tab.
  2. Toggle on New View
  3. Click the Ellipsis menu.
  4. Select Analyze labor allocation.

Cells will now be color-coded to reflect labor utilization:

  • Blue – Under allocation (below the configured threshold)
  • Red – Over allocation (above the configured threshold)
  • No color – Within the allowed thresholds

Labor Activity line items are grouped by Resource, and any allocations that fall outside the defined thresholds are highlighted in the corresponding color. Cells without color indicate that the allocation is within the acceptable range.

You can hover over any cell to see the resource’s total capacity and the amount allocated. Allocations can be viewed in either Hours or FTE.

Labor Capacity

Each labor resource is assigned a working calendar that defines their working days and hours. To learn more about configuring calendars, see Working Calendars.

In Expenses → Labor, a resource’s Start Date, End Date, and Monthly FTE Capacity determine how much capacity is available for planning. Labor capacity in hours is calculated using the following formula:

Monthly Capacity = (Monthly Working Days × Daily Working Hours × Monthly Labor Quantity)

This calculated capacity is used in the Labor Activity tab to determine over- and under-allocation.

Example:

Assuming a Gregorian calendar with the working calendar configuration above (5 days per week, 8 hours per day) and one non-working day for New Year’s Day:

Working capacity for January = (23 working days − 1 holiday) × 8 hours = 176 hours