StaffMap
Workforce capacity and strategic resource-planning platform
StaffMap was created as the main sponsor's leadership remit expanded from one specialist function to a much broader department of 95 employees spanning product, agile, analysis and operational-effectiveness teams. The larger organisation brought significantly more directions, projects and initiatives, but no single environment in which leadership could understand the portfolio, track statuses, see capacity and leave, manage allocations, contact employees and coordinate functional and thematic teams. Built from scratch in three months, StaffMap now provides that department-wide management environment. It is used directly by the department leader, who is the product's main sponsor and contributes development priorities through the backlog.
Result: built a stable department-wide workforce and portfolio management platform in three months. Its leadership sponsor can now see projects, statuses, workload, leave and allocations in one place, reducing reliance on repeated team-by-team status requests and additional coordination meetings.
95
employees in platform scope
30
active users during the pilot period
3 months
from discovery to stable production use
1 view
people, capacity, projects and statuses
Problem
- —No visibility into who is overloaded (>90%), who is near the limit, who is free
- —Leads couldn't quickly plan teams or forecast resource availability
- —No structured skills catalogue — competency coverage was invisible
- —Employees couldn't see their own workload or request project participation
- —Leadership had no cross-team view — resourcing decisions stayed trapped inside individual teams, invisible one level up
- —No way to match one team's spare capacity against another team's unmet need — surplus and shortage coexisted with no visibility between them
Solution
- —Live workload dashboard with KPI cards and an activity feed
- —Visual timeline with three modes: project bars, heat map, compact view
- —Skills matrix: employee × hard/soft skill grid with coverage visibility
- —Self-service employee profile: projects, workload, leave, skills
- —Forward-planning view: who becomes available within 30 days and which skills upcoming projects may lack
- —Organisation hierarchy view: leadership → business directions → teams → employees
- —Cross-team resource marketplace: post "need extra capacity" or "can free up capacity", matched by headcount or workload %
Key features
Workload dashboard
Four KPI cards cover headcount, active projects, ideas and average utilisation. The same view combines portfolio capacity, team workload and a seven-day activity feed.
Forward-planning timeline
Three display modes show project allocations, weekly utilisation and a compact overview, with a 30-day forecast of staff availability and potential skills gaps.
Skills Matrix
Employee × hard/soft skill grid showing competency coverage across the team. Employees submit skill requests for moderation, while leads can add skills directly; validation rules prevent duplicate records.
Organisation hierarchy
A multi-level view connects department leadership, business areas, teams and individual employees. Unassigned staff are tracked separately, and business-area filters work across the platform.
Cross-team resource marketplace
Teams can publish capacity needs or availability and match them by headcount or workload percentage, making spare capacity visible beyond individual team boundaries.
Strategic reporting
A plan-versus-actual view with project-level detail and XLSX export supports reporting for department leaders.
Role-Based Access (4 roles)
Defined visibility and permission rules for Employee → Lead → DAT Head → Admin: employees see their own records, leads work within their teams, and administrative access is protected by rules such as preventing the final administrator from being downgraded.
Logical Archive & Data Safety
Defined an archive rule that preserves historical skills and team records instead of permanently deleting them. Employee deactivation also closes current allocations and notifies the relevant lead.
Mock → Real Account Migration
Pilot launch mode: DAT Head and Admin can link mock accounts to real users — all allocations, skills, and history are preserved during migration.
My role
Designed and built StaffMap from scratch in three months, taking it from discovery to a stable production product through AI-assisted delivery. I worked directly with the department leader as the main sponsor and user, and evolved the product from a team-level workload tool into a department-wide management environment as his remit expanded. I owned the product decisions, requirements, validation, migration acceptance and production iteration; code generation and framework-level implementation were AI-assisted.
End-to-end ownership
Discovery & scope
Interviewed team leads and analysts, synthesised the operational problems and prioritised the workforce-planning scope.
Requirements & rules
Defined user journeys, functional requirements, business rules, information structure and the four-role access model.
Workforce & portfolio model
Connected capacity, allocations, skills, organisational structures, projects, initiatives and management views.
Data continuity
Specified soft archiving, mock-to-live account migration, allocation closure and safeguards for historical records.
AI-assisted delivery
Translated product decisions into a working platform using AI-assisted tools, with iterative testing and explicit acceptance.
Production & adoption
Validated releases, incorporated sponsor feedback and expanded the platform from one team to department level.
Key decisions & trade-offs
Separate scope from adoption
Used the 95-person department scope while tracking 30 active pilot users separately; wider rollout remains a planned next step.
Preserve history instead of deleting records
Used logical archiving and controlled account migration so skills, allocations and team history remain available.
Release means reachable for users
Treated real access and data continuity as acceptance conditions, not just a successful deployment.
Professional evidence
Delivery approach
Product & analysis
AI-assisted delivery
Production ownership
Validation