# Engagement effort data & resource planning

Suhas Narayan | Business Intelligence Engineer

Sanitized portfolio case study prepared for portfolio review.

## Business challenge

A new time-tracking tool captured PM hours against engagements to measure effort and staffing needs. Incomplete and late submissions made the data unreliable for cost-to-serve and capacity planning, requiring visibility into missing entries, timeliness, and completeness.

## My contribution

I owned metric definitions, the expected-submitter data model, reporting ETL, QuickSight dashboard delivery, and customer validation. I also challenged the proposed timeliness definition, tested alternative cutoffs on real data, and secured customer agreement on the adopted rule.

## Decisions & methods

- Made missing submissions measurable. Built the expected employee-week population from the employee roster and a weekly calendar, then matched submissions to it. This kept people who logged no hours visible, giving managers a complete view of submission gaps.
- Reframed timeliness around what the source could support. The proposed daily lateness calculation required logging timestamps that the weekly submission model did not capture. I prototyped alternative cutoffs on real data and demonstrated the differences to the customer, who adopted the end of the following Monday, before Tuesday, as the weekly deadline.
- Defined the eligible population before calculating rates. Applied the organization’s location-based time-tracking exclusions so employees who were not expected to submit did not count against their teams. Kept submission participation, hours completeness, and on-time submission as distinct measures, each with an explicit definition.
- Turned exception reporting into manager accountability. Used employee-week flags to keep submission measures consistent across engagement views, and built manager leaderboards against agreed targets alongside weekly trends and regional breakdowns. Kept employee-level data restricted while giving managers visibility to act on gaps.

## Outcome

Enabled more reliable engagement effort and resource planning through exception reporting and manager-level accountability. Customer-reported participation increased from 55% to 78%, while on-time submissions reached 86.7%, across 127 team members in 17 countries.

## Results & context

The customer reported participation rising from approximately 55% at launch to a 78% eight-week rolling average, a 23-percentage-point improvement. On-time submissions reached 86.7% from a 40–50% baseline. More complete and timely effort data supported cost-to-serve analysis, capacity planning, and visibility into staffing needs across engagements.

## Methods & Tools

PySpark, Spark SQL, AWS Glue, Amazon QuickSight, Metric design, Stakeholder alignment