Resource Planning and Capacity Planning Software
When you put someone on a project, the question you are really asking is how utilized they already are. SUNAGO Matrix answers it on the spot: every allocation raises that person's load, the whole team reads as a colour-coded heat map, and anything past 100 percent turns red the moment you commit it.
Utilization is the number you are reading when you staff a project
Ask a partner whether a consultant can take on a piece of work and the honest answer is usually a guess. They know about their own project. They may know roughly about one other. The third commitment, made last Tuesday in a different conversation, is the one nobody accounts for, and it is almost always the one that breaks the plan.
Overallocation is rarely a decision. It is three separate reasonable commitments made by three people who each had partial information. What closes that gap is a single figure per person that every allocation feeds, computed rather than tallied by hand, visible at the moment of the decision rather than in a report next month.
That figure is utilization: the share of somebody's capacity already committed. In the resources module it is what the heat map is coloured by, so staffing a project stops being a question you ask around the office and becomes something you can see.
A worked example: three reasonable commitments
One senior consultant on a standard 37-hour week at 100 percent capacity, so 7.4 hours a day. Here is how utilization moves as three project leads each allocate what they need.
| Allocation | Entered as | Daily load | Utilization | Heat map |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retainer, ongoing | 40% of daily capacity | 2.96 h | 40% | Green |
| Systems integration | 35% of daily capacity | 2.59 h | 75% | Yellow |
| Proposal support, 3 weeks | 60 hours fixed | 4.00 h | 129% | Red |
Each commitment on its own is modest. The third is where utilization passes 100 percent, and the square turns red as it is entered rather than in the week somebody notices the work is running late.
Note the two units in the middle column. The retainer and the integration are percentages of a day, which is how ongoing commitments behave. The proposal support is 60 fixed hours spread across the business days of a three-week range, which is how a defined piece of work behaves. Both are supported, and both resolve into the same utilization figure so the total is comparable.
What you do about it is a judgement call: move the proposal work, bring somebody else in, or accept it and watch it. The point is that it is now a decision rather than a discovery.
A utilization target per person, and per month
One firm-wide utilization target is the most common way to get this wrong. A principal who sells, manages and delivers cannot carry the same number as a full-time delivery consultant, and holding both to 85 percent means one of them is permanently failing on paper while the other is quietly under-committed.
Every employee therefore carries their own budgeted utilization rate. It defaults to 80 percent and you set it per person. Rates can also be set month by month, because a realistic July in a market where everyone is on holiday is not a realistic October, and a target that ignores that produces a year of meaningless variance reports.
Those targets are what actual load is read against, and they surface in the employee reporting alongside the rest of the firm's KPIs.
What the resources module gives you
The whole team against a timeline, coloured across five bands by how utilized each person is, so clashes and idle capacity are visible at a glance rather than reconstructed from a spreadsheet.
Anything past 100 percent of a person's capacity turns red. It is the one band that always means something is wrong, and it appears when the allocation is made rather than when delivery slips.
A budgeted utilization rate on every employee, defaulting to 80 percent and set per person, with the option of a different rate for each month of the year.
Allocate as a percentage of daily capacity for ongoing work, or as a fixed number of hours spread across the business days in a date range for a defined piece. Both resolve to the same load.
The same allocation data at three zoom levels: the day for resolving a specific clash, the week for sustained overcommitment, the month for spotting genuine free capacity.
Export the resourcing view for partner meetings, board packs or a client conversation about when their work can realistically start.
The green squares matter as much as the red ones
Overallocation is loud. Somebody complains, a deadline slips, and the firm reacts. The opposite problem is silent: a capable consultant sitting at 40 percent for six weeks because the people handing out work did not think of them. Nobody escalates it, and it shows up only as a disappointing quarter.
On a month view that person is a run of green squares, and it is the easiest pattern on the whole calendar to read. Green is not a comfort signal. It is unsold capacity you have already paid for.
It is expensive in a second way too. A person's cost per billable hour is their salary divided by the hours they actually bill, so the lower their utilization, the more each remaining hour has to carry. Under-utilization does not just lose the revenue on the idle hours, it quietly raises the cost of every hour they do bill, which is why the same figure drives project cost and margin.
Further reading: utilization rate in consulting, benchmarks by firm type and resource planning for engineering firms.
Connected to delivery and to the numbers
Allocations sit alongside the project's budget, phases and team.
Learn moreBillable and non-billable hours logged against the work you allocated.
Learn moreLeads, deal pipeline and proposals with digital signature, feeding the work you will staff.
Learn moreUtilization and resource planning: common questions
What utilization means when you allocate, what the colours mean, and how targets are set.
What does utilization mean when you are allocating people?
What do the colours on the heat map mean?
Can we set a utilization target per person?
How is a person's capacity calculated?
How do allocations work?
Can an allocation be changed once it is made?
See everyone's utilization on one calendar
EUR 3 per seat per month billed yearly, every module included, free onboarding and data transfer. 14-day trial, no credit card required.